Title: Bells and whistles come from marketing, not developers.
Review: "Inmates" makes some very good points. I disagree with laying the blame (or credit) for bells and whistles on developers, however. I work in a small but growing software firm, and the push to add extraneous features almost always comes from the sales and marketing folks. The developers who actually write the code would much rather keep squeezing the bugs out of features we already have, so they can point to "bulletproof" code they've written.Historically, marketing's drive for media attention and management's quest for investor dollars has overridden them, so that I have seen several poorly-thought-out features added to our products solely for the purpose of issuing a press release. We're beginning to change that now, making both our developers and our customers much happier.
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