The Origin of Features

John Ohno
2 min readMay 7, 2021

“Our competitor has released a new update,” the vice president said, “with thirty new features.”

“We should have new features too,” said the other vice president. “What do users want?”

“Presumably, because our competitor is second in market share, they want some of the features our competitor has produced.”

So they chose one at random from the list, and passed it along to the project architects.

“Why do we need this feature,” said the project architect, “when we already have another feature that does the same…

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John Ohno

Resident hypertext crank. Author of Big and Small Computing: Trajectories for the Future of Software. http://www.lord-enki.net