Bloatware is a Business Opportunity (Part II)

2008/07/15

Given bloatware, what is the end-user to do?

Ben Kenobi would tell you to use an elegant weapon from a more civilized time.

1. Use an older version. In this case, oldversion.com leads the way. Whenever I do a reinstall, I use it to retrieve:

Adobe Reader 6
Nero 6
WinAMP
PowerDVD
WinRAR
...

These older versions have acceptable disk, memory and CPU footrints.

2. Use a replacement. This is where it gets interesting, and why this post is tagged as Entrepreneurship. When a software corporation gets too large, management types take over decision making and start relying on releasing a new version every 12-24 months for cashflow while minimizing risk. The result is software bloat, an opportunity for startups to create a lightweight, killer version of the software. This is what happened or is happening to the bloatware I mentioned in Part I:

Adobe Reader superseded by FoxIt Reader
Nero is superseded by DeepBurner
Adobe Photoshop superseded by Paint.NET
Norton AntiVirus superseded by AVG

Notice the word supersede:

Main Entry: su·per·sede Pronunciation: \ˌsü-pər-ˈsēd\ Function: transitive verb ... 1 a: to cause to be set aside b: to force out of use as inferior 2: to take the place or position of 3: to displace in favor of another

There are many markets where the older players have become bloatware but no good replacements have yet popped up, presenting a business opportunity for startups. Here I will only mention one example I have personal experience with as a software developer: architectural CAD software. The standard players all have old legacy codebases which are bloated, they are very slow to add features and are unable to improve the application in fundamental ways. The market might be ripe for a small, lean and mean CAD machine. (On the other hand, CAD is not mainstream software, so marketing and sales is hard.)

3. Use a web application. AJAX and Flash is where all the start-up activity is in Silicon Valley. When using a web application, users innately expect less functionality that works better as compared to a desktop application, making these type of markets ideal for a <12 month startup cycle. Again sticking to the four examples in Part I:

Online PDF viewing: Scribd makes it possible, but it's a step backward since it's Flash, so there's still room to innovate; e.g. instead of rendering in Flash, render in HTML!
Online backup software: the user's upstream bandwidth is the only limit here; once that is surpassed, doing local backups and burns will be superseded by a company doing it for you and snail mailing the media to your postal address
Online image editing: there's SplashUp but there's lots of room to innovate here
Online AntiVirus: since most users get viruses through the Internet there's probably a market for a scanning and blocking proxy service

The Web 2.0 motto is Do one thing and do it well. In the desktop software world you have to do more, but the idea is the same: be lean and mean with a clean user interface and workflow. Bloatware always looses in the end.

- Marton Trencseni