There's really nothing wrong with new features as long as you understand that there's a certain subset of users who don't want things to change. Maybe it's because people are already trained on the current version, or they don't want to have to upgrade machines just to run the new feature set, or any of a thousand reasons you may not have thought of.

And then there are the "upgrades" that try to force you to pay more.

There was a dev tool that I purchased a couple years ago. Don't remember the name. It was reasonably priced and came with 1 year of support. A bit over a year later I got a notification that they had put out an update, so I downloaded it to take a look, only to find out that it had deleted the version I had bought and my license wouldn't transfer over. If I didn't now buy this new version, not only could I not use it past the trial period, but I'd lost the version I had before.

Yeah, I was pissed. And the company really had trouble understanding why I was so pissed off by this behavior. I did finally find out where I could download the version I had before, but there went my entire workday. And the product that previously I would recommend became something I cautioned people to avoid!

The subset of people who don't want things to change are running which OS exactly? User interface is just like any other artistic field: it has fashion trends. Look at something that's been around forever and is still developed: BBEdit. Yeah sure the app has not changed a *ton*, but its changed more than you think. Many fads in OS X design (like drawers) had to be implemented and later removed.

Any successful piece of software cannot realistically just stay still. It has to keep evolving with the trends of user interface. The difficult part is doing it well. BBEdit has managed it.

>The subset of people who don't want things to change are running which OS exactly?

All of them? Hell I hate it when things change in a way that forces me to give them attention now rather than when I have time. Nothing worse than doing an update and having to rework my flow, scripts, and code just to be productive again. Let me choose when I update my tools, don't force it on me just because your UI team found an even more complicated and torturous way to make simple things ugly and hard - I have my own work to do.

The problem is that you generally can't support yourself by just selling to existing customers; you need to keep selling to new customers.

And the market keeps evolving, so you need to evolve with the market if you want to continue selling.

If you do it slowly enough, and cautiously, then existing customers can adapt.

But if you stop updating your app, it's eventually going to lose its appeal and will be forgotten.

I think this is kind of disproven by a feature that was added to Microsoft Word in the 1990s (I don't think it is still around, although I may be mistaken). It was called "WordArt" and let the user do things like write the word "shark" with the letters deformed so it looked like a picture of a shark. Why would you want to do this? I have no idea. It's just obvious that the people working on Microsoft Word needed to add something and just bug fixes weren't enough, I guess (although they still don't have a reference management system which is why things like EndNote still exist)

I wonder if you are trolling or being serieus, because me and literally everyone i know would use this feature extensively. For powerpoints, school presentations, birthday cards. 50% of the time I fired up Word, it would be for that feature.

I seriously have never seen this used ever. But it sounds like you are talking about children using it, which I hadn't considered (I was already an adult in the 1990s).

Are you kidding? That would actually make presentations fun again.

Time moves on. In the 80's, 90's and 00's entire genres and niches were explored and defined. Much of the software I use matured around the time that article was written, and the "new features" in a lot of software are so niche, that they are big enough draws to buy new software versions. Hence the move to subscription for everything. Microsoft office is a generic example. The company I work for has all versions from 2007 through current in use. There are no features in the newer versions that change how we work.

Many people I know in my industry have been looking to dump the service contracts for CAD software for 10+ years. No useful added features, no improvements in stability, and no service to speak of through the VARs. What is the point of paying?