Bloatware, also known as “feature creep”, occurs when successive versions of a program siphon off more and more memory and processing power, slowing everything down without delivering noticeable improvements.
The bloatware problem is bigger than ever, as “useful” software has migrated from the desktop to the phone, then to the cloud and even to SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) products. SaaS software is particularly annoying because it was originally sold as a simplified answer to overload. According to Gartner, “by 2023, enterprises will overspend $750 million on unused features in IT software.”
The time has come for the tech world to cut out superfluous software.
How did it start?
In its early days, bloatware was essentially limited to the frills that software companies added to their products to entice users. But a second type of bloatware has also imposed itself in the PC era: it is software preinstalled on a machine because it represented an additional source of income for PC manufacturers.
In other cases, the bloatware came in the form of pre-installed “trial software”. Anyone who has purchased a PC in the past twenty years has been plagued by pop-ups and promotional offers from software security companies and others, inviting users to try their product for a free trial period.
Browser-based computing has spawned another form of bloatware. They come in the form of additional toolbars and browser extensions that people unknowingly downloaded when they just wanted to explore a website or install a legitimate application. With the smartphone appeared a whole universe of games, services and informative applications such as the weather forecast, which no one had asked for but which cluttered up precious space on our small screens.
How is it going ?
Bloatware has become increasingly rampant, shifting from consumer targets to enterprise targets. Engineers invent new gimmicks and nifty new features and that’s what justifies adding a new element to a product rather than innovations that users need. Sellers need new features to show the world that a product is growing and improving, and thus more easily sell the latest version.
Large accounts demand specialized features that are now part of the product everyone uses, and thus pay more for features they may not need, want or use .
Perhaps most surprisingly, the big cloud software makers have picked up the bad habits of old software vendors. In the 1990s and early 2000s, we saw the rise of COTS (commercial off-the-shelf software), otherwise known as “packaged applications”, which were intended to help companies trying to simplify and standardize their infrastructure. What they got was the opposite.
Instead of addressing the need to streamline efforts, these overloaded applications have created more work, forcing companies to modify their own processes to accommodate these tools. The pendulum has shifted towards SaaS tools, which are more powerful and easier to deploy, but still allow COTS to infiltrate. Products that were once user-friendly and intuitive now require large IT departments to operate.
Bloatware, whatever its cause or form, is more than just a nuisance. The value proposition of SaaS was to move from an ownership model to one based on usage or consumption. In an attempt to tick all the feature boxes, vendors began to pretend they cared about it, causing even more angst among IT people who didn’t need the extra frills, but rather the quickly add value to their business.
With this bulky software, IT departments waste time configuring or unconfiguring features that should have been configured correctly from the start. These complicated and difficult-to-manage software packages and platforms hamper business agility and keep IT teams from focusing on what they need to do. In addition to integration issues, bloatware clogs networks and consumes processing power.
Bloatware also has an impact on security. They can extend a company’s attack surface. While it is obvious that a system that is too complex is even more difficult to defend, increasing the attack surface does not simplify things. It’s no surprise that data breaches are already on track to break records this year.
The fact that so many SaaS vendors are guilty of using bloatware is particularly ironic for those of us who operate in this space. Indeed, the initial argument for SaaS was a kind of anti-bloat solution, ie simple and easy-to-use tools that significantly reduced a company’s IT costs.
How to end it?
In the enterprise world, a new generation of simplified SaaS products has emerged over the past decade. She tries to help small and medium-sized businesses that don’t have the IT budgets to deal with bloatware.
To avoid them, IT should make application rationalization a frequent and regular strategic activity to review all SaaS applications and thus assess whether to keep, remove, or replace an application. In fact, managing SaaS applications should become a key metric for IT, with the goal being to have less.
When launching a new application, another key measure could help combat bloatware. Its use should be monitored or not. If actually used, determine if all features are used. If the application is not used, it must be decommissioned. If not all features are used, it can be replaced.
It is time to end this practice and learn from the past. To address the glut of software, we need to create software that gets right to the heart of what users need – SaaS that’s easy to customize, efficient to manage, and flexible to integrate.