In my experience it is also an effect of quality management systems like ISO 9000 and GMP. Change control is a pain often enough that I often call it change prevention but removing things is even worse. Once it has been added and (pre)validated the grind to get things removed again just makes it extremely difficult.
Worse are older processes and procedures. Years of adding checks or controls after any mistake or problem can create an enormous bloated quality theatre. Add to this that some of these might have been added on an agreement with corporate or even regulatory authorities and any removal becomes almost impossible.
Android subtracted one of my favorite features and replaced it with something else. I used custom sounds for my top 5 sms text correspondents. Each person had a distinct sound. No matter which thread/conversation she commented in, Person A caused person A sound. Life was good. Google decided that instead I wanted to be able to assign each thread/conversation a distinct sound. Threads with person A could have a thread A sound. Threads with person B could have a thread B sound. The thread with Persons A & B together could have a thread A&B sound. But it was now impossible for every text from person A to have one sound. The sound person A makes now depends on which thread the text is in. Like the TV shoppers who loved ‘that one feature’ I am unhappy it’s gone. Android could give users the option of custom sounds per contact OR custom sounds by thread, but it’s thread only these days.
edlin is a knock off of the mighty ed. I’ve gotten the v6 and v7 versions running on modern POSIX syatems. There is no bloat there. The regex engine is extremely compact and beautiful. Also. It was originally written for a Real OS.
My introduction to personal computers was DOS. Everything that comes after that is just unnecessarily cruftier ways of representing text. All bloat all the time. Which brings us rather neatly back to the OP. Less would be more.
My introduction to computers was also MS-DOS. I loved it as a kid, but I lost all my nostalgia* for it after I started using Linux. DOS is woefully underpowered. That said, I have been playing with NetBSD because Linux is getting to be a bit much.
But FreeDOS is still a thing. Are you cruising the BBS with it?
(*) Ok, not all of it, but booting to the text console and starting my GUI manually covers it.
I was thinking this, too. American marketing culture has forever been about “but wait, now you get THIS, too!” because added features is invariably treated as added “value”.
Thanks to @nixiebunny I was able to look at a couple of the underlying studies (I’m not committed enough to make this point to actually go through them all) and I not only were they apparently done without any particular attention being paid to where they were, but also I noted at least one experiment they basically implied to people that adding blocks was good in both the group where they didn’t remind people they could remove blocks and the group where they did remind them. So to me that wasn’t even showing what it purported to show.
Not that I think it’s impossible this is some kind of cross cultural result, I just want to insert skepticism about what “people” are like.
