This is a disturbing trend. A corporation “upgrades” their product. The new version is inferior to the old version.
The new delicious sucks! I stopped using it. I switched to Firefox’s bookmark feature plus hand-edited html. I should write my own delicious clone.
My father uses Chase. They upgraded their “buy stocks by phone” system and now it’s worse. They upgraded their monthly statement design, and the new version gives less information than their old version.
When we first got Time-Warner cable, the cable box worked fine. They upgraded their software, and it started crashing once a week. They patched the software and it started working better. Also, the cable signal frquently glitches, which started happening about 2 years ago. I can record a show, only to see that the cable glitches made it unwatchable. Then, we upgraded to an HD TV and got an HD cable box. The “new” cable box crashes every few days. We literally have to unplug it and let it reboot.
The landline telephone stopped working. They did fix it, but now only one phone rings instead of both.
The new UI for Google Analytics and Blogger is inferior to the old version. The new Analytics UI was so awful to use, that I just stopped using it. (I should install piwik here.)
This is a common problem. It’s very disturbing. Very often, the “new and improved” product is inferior to the old version.
Stupid and/or nasty people push out the good workers.
In one company I wrote a nice, powerful piece of software.
A couple of clowns joined our group. They had nothing to do. So they decided to push me out of the group and they took over my software. After 6 months they released it and it was virtually unusable. Just before they took over my software they banned me from showing it around the company! My version of the software worked absolutely fine.
Ironically my software could have saved the company a vast fortune every year.
This has been driving me crazy for some time now. Everything is going to shit. It’s a very rare product that actually improves over time.
Here is what I have observed often happening. A company suddenly has a fantastic product. The product gets better. Everyone buys it. The company grows market share.
What is happening behind the scenes is a really good developer was working there creating the product. After a few years he points out he brings millions of dollars to the company. They tell him he is not worth that much and his job can be sent to India. So he quits and starts his own company. The company then hires a bunch of college graduates who don’t know anything, or they outsource to India. The new team then proceeds to screw up the product big time. The person with the vision that made the product coherent and cohesive is gone and with it is gone the soul of the product.