The crazy thing to me is that if they rolled out a native desktop app that was maybe a little bit lacking in features and used ~20MB RAM and had this particular misfeature in it and called it beta, people would applaud them for it, especially here on HN.
Instead they spent actual time, effort, and money making their product worse.
My company has certain deficiencies, but one of our core principals is that we'll never break a workflow, even if the workflow is dumb, even if the "feature" is actually a bug that an enterprising user abused in a way we didn't anticipate. The bad news is that we're saddled with a ton of legacy crap that can't be rewritten. The good news is that we've grown into one of those behemoths that dominates a niche specialized industry and won't be unseated by a product that is only, say, twice as good as ours. It's not as fun as iterating fast and breaking things, but the low stress is nice.
After this change I really want to develop a native chat application on Windows and OS X. I think it’s almost to the point where someone who did they could make a killing.
Instead they spent actual time, effort, and money making their product worse.
My company has certain deficiencies, but one of our core principals is that we'll never break a workflow, even if the workflow is dumb, even if the "feature" is actually a bug that an enterprising user abused in a way we didn't anticipate. The bad news is that we're saddled with a ton of legacy crap that can't be rewritten. The good news is that we've grown into one of those behemoths that dominates a niche specialized industry and won't be unseated by a product that is only, say, twice as good as ours. It's not as fun as iterating fast and breaking things, but the low stress is nice.