Yesterday I watched a 40 minute video explaining Microsoft's new UI for Office 12. They demonstrate clearly the purpose of their new Command Tab (aka The Ribbon) approach. One of the main reasons to move away from the standard menu and toolbar paradigm is that Word went from their initial 100 features to 1500 features in the latest version. This doesn't comfortably fit in a menu structure anymore. Apple makes similar claims about Mac OS X Tiger, stating that it has over 200 new features.
That made me wonder: what is a feature?
How do you determine that a certain aspect of an application has the right to be called 'a feature'. What are the smallest parts you can split things up in? Is having a rich text editor a feature; or are bold, italics, underline, align, font selection, color selection, ... all features. This makes a big differences when saying "my application has googolplex features" (yeah, Google seems to be geek stuff inspired all the way up to its name).
To me this sounds like another marketing ploy where numbers are used to try to back up one's superiority but in reality don't have any meaning at all. Makes me think of Michael Ende's Momo (The Grey Gentlemen) chapter: the correct calculation that is wrong, where people are tricked into giving their precious time to evil men in gray.
