The longer and larger a system grows the harder it is to change its foundations.
Users invests time and resources into many different ways of using a system. The larger a system gets any change has higher probability of impacting more people.
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Examples
- Law: American Constitution has more than 200 years and only 19 amendments.
- Programming languages. HTML was the initial language for creating websites. CSS was invented to expand its capabilities. Further down the road, developers added JavaScript and libraries of predefined HTML/CSS components such as Bootstrap, Tailwinds, Tachyons. HTML is a poorly designed system and it's patched by all the subsequent systems. potentially there could be a better system designed to unify all of the functionality. However, it would be a nearly impossible task to switch to it. There are a lot of actors are relying on it. The current system is already working. It is connected in a long chain of tools, languages and other dependencies. Browsers are built to support it.
- Art: Very often artists at the beginning of their careers develop some style, ways of communicating, visual shortcuts for self-expression and stick to it for the rest of their lives. Wilhelm Sasnal said that first he was searching wide and later in the career he will probably go deep within the style and approach he developed at the beginning.
- Software: Compare the complexity of old vs. new software. Photoshop vs. Sketch. Evernote vs. Bear. Microsoft Excel vs. Airtable. Complexity makes the software harder to use. Let’s take the example of Photoshop. Photoshop grew a large user base and slowly accumulated a lot of features. Photoshop creators didn’t prune overlapping features. And currently the software has too many features and too many ways of solving things. There is a lot of users relying on some particular features and because of that it is very hard to restructure or delete it. This complexity makes it slow to use for advanced users and difficult to learn for the new users.
See more on system design in Mental models create
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