Worse, they're often tied to changes nobody asked for or wanted, including the customers in particular, and importantly, you can't tell which kind of update you'll get.
Very true, I often dread "upgrades" or "redesigns" to software or websites that I like using. Everything seems to now be adding hoops that you have to jump through.
This is why I often prefer things that I either have to pay for or that are OSS because then at least I feel like I have some of influence in the relationship.
I dread the day that google slap a login page up in front of their search engine service.
This drives me absolutely nuts too. There is just too much pressure from various different job functions within companies to constantly change things even if it doesn't actually improve the customer's experience. People don't want to maintain old products, they want to work on something new. Compensation and promotions are dependent on shipping a fancy new product (looking at you Google). Management pressures people below them to change something even though they don't understand the customer's needs. I'm sure you could come up with a dozen more reasons.
This has gotten so much worse now that everything is a subscription web service and you can't continue using the product unless you accept whatever crappy redesign they have pushed out this time that took away the feature you liked using or the workflow you are used to.
Unfortunately irrationally difficult customers are a bit like death and taxes in that sense, but "We have a new version with some minor fixes that you can use" is generally an easier sell than "We have a new version with some major changes that will completely disrupt your workflow".
The majority of those changes aren't visible to users. As a corporate developer, I can tell you that it's extremely hard to get funding to make even the most necessary technical changes to an existing piece of software. Normally, the best you can do is sneak it in with a big redesign that has features worth paying for.
That is so very true. Great companies know this and have the guts to go ahead and make the needed changes anyway.
Your point also hints at the fact that asking users isn't always the right thing to do - often they don't know exactly what they want. Either because they can't imagine it or because of the friction you describe.
This seems mostly anecdotal; to offer another data point, as a user I don't care that much about what has been added. I want devs to handle complex changes behind the scenes and give me the improved product.
Nothing I said implies the user has to find it. With rolling deployments and blue/green strategies, bad changes don't even have the potential to go live.
This seems like it happens with physical products too more and more. I may be reading too much into it, but it often feels like this is done (with products and software) to soften you up with the aim of shifting things subtly in favour of the producer:
- make it less something you settle with longer-term and more something that's basically roughly the same axe but differs on a pretty short timeframe
- use the changes to probe what people care about to a greater / less extent
- take away as much that the average person doesn't care about enough to get really annoyed about (which is fine if it's cheaper/better for the consumer but often it's more about hiding the change in the blizzard of activity so you don't get it cheaper or notice the cuts that save the producer without passing it on).
In software the one that was eternally annoying everyone I worked with was WebEx - initially a product that was great in my firm but eventually became the reason no one could start meetings on time because you couldn't rely on it launching in a timely manner because there'd be some idiotic update. It carried on until we ditched it abruptly - great move PM :)
Anyway, it's annoying but at least it's not as bad as the other modern trend: wilfully messing things up for you, so they can charge you to have the non-messed up version back (eg airline seats being broken up on purpose for no good reason! Unless you pay a fee for them not to be a total pain!)
I mean, at my work, a lot of our customers don't even know what our program needs to send to some other program until months after the change needs to be live...
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