Comment: Down with bloatware!

Dr Tim Watson

It killed the dinosaurs and it's killing us. As if that wasn't bad enough, our software is going the same way. Try as we might, the constant drive for things to get bigger seems irresistible. Bloatware rules. In an age in which every hardware device seems to be shrinking to near invisibility, why is it that the same isn't happening to our software? Isn't it about time that we demanded less, not more?

The problem is not just the amount of disk space and RAM that is taken up by ever-expanding software applications, it is also the proliferation of features. To take just one example, I am sure that, whatever you need, "there's an app for that" but I have no imminent need to share bread recipes by shaking my phone in the vicinity of a fellow bakery enthusiast. Isn't it supposed to be a phone?

It is said that a key skill in fine art is knowing when to stop; the most important advice given to chefs striving for their third Michelin star is to simplify. So why is it that, in our industry, "feature rich" is seen as a virtue?

Feature rich is certainly not an attractive attribute for the security-conscious or for anyone who needs good performance. Less is more. Every new feature adds another potential vulnerability and performance hit yet, in many cases, the features are often unwanted or unused (for instance, I'd quite like to be using a word processor that doesn't have a built-in programming language to write this article).

We should use our influence as consumers to demand less from vendors, not more, and save our IT systems from the same fate as the overly complex, global financial systems.

It's our own fault. Email clients have to parse hundreds of data formats, any one of which might be exploited to compromise our security, because we can't resist sending emails stuffed with embedded and attached content in myriad forms.

Why send HTML emails with Word attachments when all we're sending is some simple text? Why not embrace the beauty and simplicity of inline, plain Ascii? We're content with it for SMS, why the need for baroque encrustations? Take comfort in the joy of text.

Small is beautiful: Kylie Minogue, Schubert lieder, haiku, Fermat's little theorem, nanotechnology. In spite of the trend towards quantity over quality, there are some software products that resist the tide and fight the flab.

The motto of SQLite is: 'Small. Fast. Reliable. Choose any three'. And some of the most dangerous software is small: the Slammer worm was only 376 bytes long but managed to infect 90 per cent of all the vulnerable machines on the internet within 10 minutes. Some 200,000 machines were infected. It was its small size that made it so potent, and it was the complexity of the software it targeted that provided the vulnerability it exploited.

It hasn't always been this way. In the early days of computing, software was severely limited by the hardware on which it ran. The 3D wireframe graphics of Elite were a marvel of software engineering, a concrete example of simple but subtle algorithmic ingenuity. One of the oldest and still one of the best operating environments is the Unix shell, allowing complex tasks to be performed by piping output from one simple command to another, each command designed to do one thing well.

Let's strive to regain what we have lost. Our software needs to get in shape, lose a few pounds, become stronger and more robust. From us all, the rallying cry should go out to software vendors big and small: we demand less!

Dr Tim Watson is head of the Department of Computer Technology at De Montfort University