I'm bringing this up, because today was the third time my tech bubble was recently violated in a way that I would classify as consumer-hostile and borderline intrusive. I'm talking about the recent update to Spotify's web player interface and my latest surprise heart attack - the spectacular assault on reality, known as the redesigned Skype 8 update (in my case on Android - I've no idea where else they've rolled out the changes at this point). I've managed to calm myself marginally about the former, but right now I'm probably even more infuriated about the latter than I was about Spotify when the change hit.

Also, if you're familiar with video editing, then this also applies to the latest change Adobe made to text editing in Premiere Pro when they completely hid the traditional titling tool and blindly forced the new (still) heavily lacking Essential Graphics travesty down anyone's throat who was brave enough to keep their software up to date.

So - let's recap what happened in all three cases:

- a multi-billion dollar company took a functional and well-established product and changed it
- they got rid of MOST of the features any marginally more serious user than a grandma used on a daily basis
- they "streamlined" the service by making it less responsive and less intuitive to use
- they removed any semblance of anything that might be construed as "settings" or "options"
- they replaced the above with meaningless trite like "choose your color"
- they completely revamped the UI, in particular towards a minimalistic tablet-style solution (large letters, lots of empty space)
- they apparently fired anyone who had any guts to say anything about the changes or flat out executed their product testing team
- they rolled out the changes overnight in an automatic update with none of the following:

  - a way to opt out
  - a way to opt in
  - a chance to sample the update
  - a chance to roll back (not true in Adobe's case)
  - a chance to give feedback directly
  - a chance to understand what the hell just happened

These are massive companies making groundbreaking changes like children.

Make no mistake - these changes were not tested. Because if they were, they would know that the new version of Skype lags like hell. They would know that the new version of Spotify's web interface does not find the music you're looking for - even if you're fine with it not having 90% of the features it used to have. And you would know that when you write a text editing tool, then Shift-Arrow, Shift-Home/End and Ctrl+A should probably do something with the selection of the text you're currently working with, not scrub the timeline in a completely different window. These problems are beyond obvious and should never have made it past basic quality testing.

These changes were likely unpopular already internally, because if they weren't these would be released as optional "cool new" alternative features (kind of what Lastpass does with its revamped UI). These wouldn't be MASSIVE overnight changes that absolutely obliterate the user experience and are introduced prematurely (at best) with a 40-second marketing video.

These changes are not immutable milestones on a timeline.  Because these companies have the means (I'm not necessarily talking about the will) to scrap a failed iteration. Neither are these products facing a myriad of expectations in terms of changes. In fact, while in Adobe's case progress was likely widely hoped for, none of these three products were flat out broken. Now they are. Can I find a friend or their playlists on Spotify? NO. Can I intuitively edit something as basic as text in one of the premier video editing tools in the world (pun somewhat intended)? NO. Can I choose a goddamn emoticon, which is not in the empty most recent list, in the most widely used (hey, I'm assuming!) messaging app in the world? HELL. NO. What about changing my online status then? Get outta here!

I'll give Adobe SOME leeway here as they've actually rolled out an update to partially alleviate their respective problems since then. But that's an update that should have been part of the update that broke their software in the first place. Like, what the hell? Nobody expects you to release updates on a predetermined schedule that YOU decide. Just make a better schedule and release software that doesn't break people's work flow and in many cases cause them to lose real money because of time lost to learning how to sidestep your broken features. Or, you know, warn us about it...

That being said, the lackluster and absolutely nerve-wrecking changes both Spotify and now Microsoft have made are beyond any form of logic to me.  I have one question to ask: why!?

I mean, I'm a semi-advanced (or in these particular cases, an relatively expert) user. I know my settings and I love my options. Though I can also understand if you want to reduce clutter and make your thing more slick. Just give me that one option, which spells out "Advanced" in itsy bitsy tiny letters. Don't resort to completely removing anything that might even remotely resemble a settings menu from your application. You still have the settings. They haven't gone anywhere. I know you have them, because you need to configure your bloody application somehow! And I'm not saying I was necessarily happy with Skype's interface before (okay, I thought it was convoluted and unwieldy to the point where it felt like it should be completely redone). But now they've torched everything and gone all the way back to 1970. Like... goddamn, you people... Stop!

Just stop.

And THINK for a moment.

That being said - I'm not quite as mad about Spotify, because they transitioned their player from Flash to HTML5. It was still hostile to the consumer, but I do realize that many people use the web player to circumvent the paywall (heyho, Adblock), so that might have been their little revenge. But I'm going to fault Adobe (which is in the business of designing prosumer productivity tools) and Microsoft (which in this case is in a unique position to provide a service that is both well-established and heavily used) to the fullest.

Most importantly, all these companies have recently made changes that are going to screw up any semblance of a nuanced software market in the future - these changes in popular products are all designed to dumb everything down to the point of "how straight can we make this curve without turning it into a line", and they are inevitably going to act like erasers on most consumers. They're going to dim our memory and eventually (which, let's be honest, is a matter of months to a few years) completely reform our expectation of what software is and what it can be. And I feel SO sorry for that, because the services these products purport to provide are actually fantastic.

The set of applications that have lost their accessibility in favor of "accessibility" (usually at the expense of performance and, you know, accessibility) is ever-growing. Windows itself, the Office suite (which now even has the cool new feature of crashing randomly), proprietary Android distros (which are becoming more like iOS every day, but still fail to copy the most basic of accessibility features they so desire to emulate, like searchable settings) and so forth. These changes are being force-fed to us and feedback like this probably doesn't even make it near the review board.

So, if anyone from the Skype product management team happens to read this - well done, you've just screwed not only your customer base, but you've undermined both your product and the future software in general. Claps to you!

Which brings me back to the question posed in the topic - given this trend, what is the future of software anyway?

That's... a lot of text.

Remember that what, to you, is a "functional and well-established product" is potentially some company's product that is not reaching enough new users, and perhaps has an old and arcane interface that existing users have learned to live with but which may have driven away many more. They assume that dedicated users will adapt, and that new users may be tempted in.

None of which is to say that I don't have a lot of sympathy for you. I've been annoyed at seemingly arbitrary changes many times - SourceTree used to be my favourite GUI version control tool and they completely obliterated that a couple of times when they figured it was more important to relaunch with a new interface than to actually keep all the functionality. I got annoyed at Sonar (music program) when they completely re-did their UI to favour new users and especially touch-screen users at the expense of traditional mouse users. Or when Firefox decided that menus were obviously pointless and hid them (but can't actually remove them, because they're still useful). And I've often been baffled at how Facebook started out deliberately trying to avoid the garish aspects of MySpace and then has been gradually introducing them back in one by one, because people like me are not its target audience any more.

Often I doubt whether there is really any improvement with these things, and I feel mistreated as a long-term user. But at the end of the day, existing users are already locked in (to a greater or lesser degree) and new users were obviously unconvinced by the previous state, so a change is often what they think is necessary.

As for the demand for 'Advanced' options, much of the move is to remove that because it tends to cause a disproportionate amount of support costs for little apparent benefit. I even saw Google once say, in official guidelines, that any feature not used by more than 80% of people should just be removed. I personally hate this, but I can see why a company that charges nothing for its products and wants mass adoption needs to streamline what it offers.

But I think this last bit is actually the most important - if we want software that suits us, we have to pay for it. There's no point adopting free software and then wondering why it changes arbitrarily, because with these programs, we're not the customer, we're the product. Skype and Facebook sell us to advertisers, Google mines our data, Spotify need to drive web users to their premium and platform-specific apps, and so on. And when you're not a customer, you have no recourse or refund if the product doesn't do what you want or what it used to. You do their beta testing for them, and they run A/B tests on you to work out how to change things to better suit them.

If we don't want this, we need to be willing to pay for alternatives, where the makers have a direct financial incentive to keep you happy, and to listen to your feedback. (I have no excuse for Adobe, but perhaps the problem there is about being a monopoly - if you have no significant competition then you can do what you like. And that monopoly is again in part because people weren't willing to pay for software, which hollowed out most of their mid-price competition.)

To add to what Kylotan has said, three instances isn't necessarily a worrying trend. It could well be three completely different and unconnected irksome updates that just happened to occur together. And sometimes companies, for whatever reason, do just make a bad design choice. What may have seemed intuitive to them isn't to everyone else.  With luck, they'll come around. 

I don't remember the last time I used the Spotify web player, so I don't know what they've changed, but I gave it a run through for a few hours and it seemed perfectly functional to me.   I did notice that there were no settings like with the Android version, but the only setting I generally ever change on Android is the equalizer, and most computers have one that's equal or better. I've never used Premier, so can't comment on it.  I feel your pain with Skype.  That update was an abomination.  Every spam message I have ever received and deleted has suddenly reappeared again, and I have to delete them one at a time. It's infuriating.

1 hour ago, Bregma said:

Anyone remember New Coke?

Yep.  Dumb updates are not a new thing.

The new Spotify web player is nigh on unusable if you were used to features like following your friends, last.fm integration, playlist management (they even removed sorting) and so forth. The web player was functionally basically a mirror of the desktop application. Now t's a shell of a music player with a design fit for for tablets. They may have patched stuff under the hood since then.

The Skype update is actually on par with the Spotify changes if you took what it offered before for granted. Personally it took me about 3 hours to get an older apk and block the app from updating.

Look - I'm not saying "don't do your own thing". And I'm not disputing there may be other reasons at work here. What I am saying is that when you're radically changing your stuff, do one of the following:

1) make it opt-in (or at least opt-out)
2) allow users to sample the changes and then make it easy (or in the very least possible) to revert
3) provide a huge red button that says "FEEDBACK" somewhere. Anywhere, really, as long as it's visible
4) warn about the changes before you silently apply them

Oh, and I realize free software makes us the product, but there's such a thing as bad design and these three examples are all very notable cases of good old poor design at work. Which is pretty much laughable if your turnover is in the tens of billions.

On 07/07/2017 at 7:40 PM, irreversible said:

Look - I'm not saying "don't do your own thing". And I'm not disputing there may be other reasons at work here. What I am saying is that when you're radically changing your stuff, do one of the following:

1) make it opt-in (or at least opt-out)
2) allow users to sample the changes and then make it easy (or in the very least possible) to revert
3) provide a huge red button that says "FEEDBACK" somewhere. Anywhere, really, as long as it's visible
4) warn about the changes before you silently apply them

I think you're either missing or choosing to ignore the deeper point here. Any significant change which is optional means that the company has to essentially support 2 versions in future. That's generally a non-starter because it's expensive and confusing. So, if a change happens it's because they believe it is better than what went before, and should replace the old version. User reaction to a change will always be negative to some degree, so they are right to ignore the sentiment (although not necessarily the detail). With that in mind, your other 3 points become mostly irrelevant.

I do have some sympathy to the degree that we're expected to keep our software up to date for bug fix and security reasons, but then these updates sometimes change features and the interface. I'd like that to stop, and for major changes to be clearly separated from bug fixes. Again, this obviously costs a company money, so there would be a limit on how far a company could take this - and it wouldn't be viable for most free software. Some companies already do something like this, and some don't.

Regarding the Spotify web player ceasing to be like the desktop player, you are assuming this is some wild mistake on their part that they are just too reckless or stupid to correct. I'd strongly disagree. It is deliberately the way it is, for a mix of reasons that include using a simple and standardised layout for phone/tablet/TV/console users (easier to maintain, and good enough for most of those users), and also to drive power users towards the desktop version (where it's harder to remove the ads without paying). Spotify have a massive cashflow problem, again because they're operating in this world where everybody expects everything to be free, so I can see why they would be trying a variety of approaches to reduce development costs and increase advertising revenue.

1 hour ago, Kylotan said:

I think you're either missing or choosing to ignore the deeper point here. Any significant change which is optional means that the company has to essentially support 2 versions in future. That's generally a non-starter because it's expensive and confusing. So, if a change happens it's because they believe it is better than what went before, and should replace the old version. User reaction to a change will always be negative to some degree, so they are right to ignore the sentiment (although not necessarily the detail). With that in mind, your other 3 points become mostly irrelevant.

I do have some sympathy to the degree that we're expected to keep our software up to date for bug fix and security reasons, but then these updates sometimes change features and the interface. I'd like that to stop, and for major changes to be clearly separated from bug fixes. Again, this obviously costs a company money, so there would be a limit on how far a company could take this - and it wouldn't be viable for most free software. Some companies already do something like this, and some don't.

Regarding the Spotify web player ceasing to be like the desktop player, you are assuming this is some wild mistake on their part that they are just too reckless or stupid to correct. I'd strongly disagree. It is deliberately the way it is, for a mix of reasons that include using a simple and standardised layout for phone/tablet/TV/console users (easier to maintain, and good enough for most of those users), and also to drive power users towards the desktop version (where it's harder to remove the ads without paying). Spotify have a massive cashflow problem, again because they're operating in this world where everybody expects everything to be free, so I can see why they would be trying a variety of approaches to reduce development costs and increase advertising revenue.

I think  I  did acknowledge both points (regarding support and the reason Spotify did what it did with the web player) in my original lengthy post, but to me the deeper problem runs even deeper and fundamentally reflects

Sticking to my original examples: how jaded do you have to be to screw up text selection in a text editing module? Or how little QA do you have to have to not realize that the new version of your text messaging service is nigh unusable, because it lags and doesn't include something as basic as emoticons, even if you type them in manually? There's supporting more than one version of a thing and then there's scrapping the previous version and releasing a broken, laggy app that has the functionality of something that belongs in 1998.

It's our fault as consumers for turning the other cheek here and it angers me that we do so ever so readily. Besides - if I'm the product, then I want to, in the very least, be in the main aisle, not to be left out back to rot.

One of the worst completely legal things big companies can do these days is to leverage their position via the ecosystem they've locked us into. I'm on Skype and I use Skype for my messaging needs, because the people I need to communicate with are also there. That being said, it's actually not THAT big of a problem if I wanted to ditch Skype. But migrating from Adobe Cloud to an alternative because of a broken feature is a no-go. Just as you really think thrice before your IDE because the dev team went Apple streamlined something fundamental like the solution explorer or the search feature into oblivion.