Does Every Product Need Constant "Innovation"?

Or can a product be "done"?

A few years back, I was in a discussion with a group of friends on the merits of Google Docs vs Microsoft Word. There was one argument made that while Word continued to innovate and add new features, Google Docs had been stagnant for years. It never really met feature parity with even the version of Word that existed a decade ago.

I have always preferred Google Docs despite this, but never could articulate why. Someone else did it for me:

The launch of Google Docs was the moment many of us no longer needed to act as tech support for our parents.

Google Docs had the one innovation, the one feature, that mattered: ease of use.

The ability to just have access to a word processor in your browser is taken for granted today. Before Google Docs, I had to visit my mom and install a word processor for her every time she bought a new computer. Same for whenever an update needed to be applied. Desktop apps tend to be finicky, especially in the Windows XP/98/95 days, so there were also constant issues there.

Browsers tended to just work (except for Internet Explorer). Web apps don't need to be installed. You just go to a url. You don't need to update them. That gets applied behind the scenes when you load the app. Consequently, any issues/bugs also get fixed automatically. If it doesn't work now, just come back in an hour. The primary trade off is the need for a constant internet connection, which is fairly easy to get post dial-up.

What about all the features that Google Docs lacks?

I was in college before Google Docs and I remember a professor talking about the challenges in getting requirements for software. He used MS Word as an example. Most people only used 10% of MS Word's features. The problem is that everyone used a different 10%. MS Word couldn't get rid of any features because someone somewhere was using it. Every feature also tends to add complexity because you need UI elements to provide those features. It can create an overwhelming experience for someone who just wants to type some text and have some basic formatting included.

That leads to a modification of the "Most people only used 10% of MS Word's features" to most *enterprise* users only used 10% of MS Word's features. A good number of people (like a millenial's parents) only needed the very basics. More functional than Notepad, but still very basic compared to MS Word. That probably amounts to less than 5% of what MS Word offers. The rest of it is worse than window dressing for them. It actively gets in their way.

Google Docs innovated not just in providing an app that was easier to install, it innovated by not implementing a lot of things most people did not need. The lack of functionality was a feature, not a bug. This mentality was in line with a lot of what I love about pre-2010 Google. A lot of innovation that Google did was by not doing things.

Consider search itself. Most search engines at the time were littered with stuff. A widget here. News there. The search box was off in a little corner. Google not only built a better search, they also got rid of everything on the home page except the search box. They correctly determined that most people go to a search engine to... search for things. Not having features was the feature.

The problem with this type of innovation is that there's kind of a cap on what you can do. If removing things from the home page is innovation, you run out of things you can do when there's only a search box on the page. There's plenty that can be done with search itself obviously, but the search home page becomes a solved problem. The only way to innovate on it is to think of a completely different type of interface for search and that's quite a difficult task. That's not the type of innovation you can expect to happen every year. Nor would most people want that anyway as there is comfort in stability.

This aspect of innovation is an interesting one as I reflect on a lot of decisions I've made or seen made in my career. There comes a point where there really isn't much to do on a product or a key aspect of a product. There's always the multi-year research on upending the fundamentals of the product, but most companies don't like making those investments. The cost is high and the returns are a die roll.

The type of innovation that is a more attractive investment are iterative ones. Tweak a feature here. Add a feature there. What happens if a product doesn't actually need new features to be better? What if it already solves the problems users already have? Do we move on and build something else? 

Nope. We believe that innovation must be constant and that there is something that can always be done to improve things. We should always be able to do it quickly too. No need for multi-year investments. We can do things quicker than that! Unfortunately, this often results in us looking for problems that don't exist, try to solve them with new features, and call it innovation.

I take a harder look at the work I do lately. There are definitely times when iterative improvements can be made, but trying to force it can negatively impact users and the business. Sometimes it is best to just leave things be and find an actual problem that needs solving.