Rohit writes the following:

“If you put the rising number of sites going through redesigns together with the fact that older users will always have adapted to your old interface – you have the New Coke vs. Coke Classic conundrum. For most of these sites, the new version sticks around (unlike Coke), however the necessity of keeping your “classic” version will be increasingly common as sites allow their longstanding users to continue using an older version of an interface that they are more comfortable with. Yahoo has done this very well with their upgrades to Yahoo Mail – I am still running the “classic” version for my personal account.”

It’s really easy for v1 products to leap ahead of established products as they have no user base to piss off with their “innovations”.

I used to use Microsoft Money to manage my finances. I know the team worked hard every year to make the experience better and better. I also know, that over time with each upgraded I ended up paying a tax of learning where they moved my stuff to and then never investigated any of their improvements. Ultimately their innovation became a tax on me no matter how good it was. (And a tax I was paying for.) This isn’t why I stopped using it (client software became burdensome for this task for me).

The folks at 37 Signals have written about (and practiced) saying “no” to new features. But, from my perspective, software is like a shark, it has to keep moving or it dies. So ultimately you can say no all you want, but at some point if you say it too often the competition will surpass you. Even Steve Jobs who is quoted all throughout the 37 Signals book is about to release his all-in-one music player, video player, photo slideshow, web browsing, e-mail sending, drink mixing, phone. I know there’s a list of things they said “no” to but it’s hard to imagine it’s very long relative to the things the iPhone is purported to do.

Ultimately, independent of what the competition does, successful companies end up with large user bases for their products. These user bases get used to the products and don’t like most change, even when it’s positive. Change is hard for people. There is no right answer here, it’s simply a very hard problem. Apple has historically taken the approach of saying no. Microsoft has historically taken the approach of saying yes to everything the customer has asked for. Are their respective OS market share numbers a reflection of this? When there’s a really innovative competitor for Basecamp that requires 37 Signals to radically modify their experience in order to stay competitive, what will they do?