In the lecture the other day, I mentioned the idea of convergence. We often talk about technology convergence, about how a single device now has many functions. I haven’t looked at phones, but I’m pretty sure you can’t just buy a mobile phone. One that is just a phone. Even the old basic phone I had before scoring the Nokia for our project was not only a phone, but had a calculator and a game and a few other functions. But the latest one I have and many that I see have phone capabilities, cameras (both still and video), games, media players, wireless, bluetooth, webbrowsing, calendar, voice recorder and other things that I still haven’t worked out. It’s not a phone. It’s an almost complete … um … it’s a complete device. It has everything but the kitchen sink. About the only thing it can’t do is wash the dishes. We have everything coming together, converging.

But, at the same time, we seem to be railing against bloat. Software bloat. Our hardware is growing ever more compact and versatile while our software is bloating with features that just slow it down. Why is this so? There was talk years ago about modularity in software. Just picking and choosing the bits you need to get the job done. Whatever happened to that idea? I’d really like to know. It just strikes me that that everything in the software area is becoming more and more one size fits all, in much the same as technologies, but it’s more problematic. Take the dreaded M$ products. All of them are bloated. How many of us need all the features embedded there? Can we turn them off? And then there’s that typical bloatware (b)Lotus. It can actually be configured as a webbrowser. Why would you want to browse in your mail app? Although, by the same token, with gmail and other web-based products, we do use our browser for mail. But i digress.

Why do we cheerfully accept more and more features in our technology, but only accept bloat in software because there’s no other choice? It’s certainly something to think about.