A note about improvement (vs. deprovement)
by Steffan Berelowitz
Steffan Berelowitz founded Bit Group, Inc. in 1995, and over its 13-year history has helped to develop a client list of Fortune 500, mid-market and emerging businesses. In addition to his responsibilities at Bit Group, Steffan served as a trustee of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council (MA Software Council) from 2001-2006. Steffan served on the board of directors of the Jewish Community Centers of Greater Boston as the chair of the advisory board of the Center for Information Technology of Hebrew College. Steffan is a member of the Boston College Technology Council. He is also a member of the Technology Network, a national network of senior executives from the nation's leading technology companies. Steffan served as an Internet consultant to former senator and presidential candidate Senator Bill Bradley. A graduate of Boston College, Steffan has spent the past 15 years in online services and technology. In 1993, Steffan was one of the key founders of ArtNet.
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Firstly, a note of thanks to colleague Hal Reed for introducing me (and now you?) to the term deprovement. Hal defines deprovement as “a change that is intended to improve something, but in actual practice makes it worse, e.g., harder to adopt, harder to use, or less reliable.”
In the world of software or Web applications, deprovement is all too often what occurs when a company enthusiastically announces their next release. Today, I was inspired to learn that Mozilla added an honest to goodness improvement in their 3.0 release of the fast growing (and excellent) browser Firefox. Their secret: Version 3.0 is reported to run “more than twice as fast as the previous version while using less memory!”
How many times have you opened the newest release of a software application only to find that the latest improvements and new features have substantially deproved your system performance? This is even more serious for a large scale Web site or Web application. As an industry, let’s try to remember that speed is one of the most important elements of software and Web site usability!