{"id":21870,"date":"2025-10-23T18:18:34","date_gmt":"2025-10-23T22:18:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/paulmaiorana.com\/notes\/?p=21870"},"modified":"2025-10-23T19:27:34","modified_gmt":"2025-10-23T23:27:34","slug":"worse-is-better-wikipedia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/paulmaiorana.com\/notes\/2025\/10\/worse-is-better-wikipedia\/","title":{"rendered":"Worse is better &#8211; Wikipedia"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Worse_is_better\">Worse is better<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Worse is better (also called the New Jersey style) is a term conceived by Richard P. Gabriel in a 1989 essay to describe the dynamics of software acceptance. It refers to the argument that software quality does not necessarily increase with functionality: that there is a point where less functionality (&#8220;worse&#8221;) is a preferable option (&#8220;better&#8221;) in terms of practicality and usability. Software that is limited, but simple to use, may be more appealing to the user and market than the reverse.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Apparently called <em>the New Jersey style<\/em> (in part, at least) as a reference to systems like Unix and C (&#8220;worse&#8221;), both developed in New Jersey at <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Bell_Labs\">Bell Labs<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Worse is better Worse is better (also called the New Jersey style) is a term conceived by Richard P. Gabriel in a 1989 essay to describe the dynamics of software acceptance. It refers to the argument that software quality does not necessarily increase with functionality: that there is a point where less functionality (&#8220;worse&#8221;) is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"link","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[258,206],"class_list":["post-21870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-link","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bell-labs","tag-new-jersey","post_format-post-format-link"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1G65p-5GK","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulmaiorana.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulmaiorana.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulmaiorana.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulmaiorana.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulmaiorana.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21870"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/paulmaiorana.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21870\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21876,"href":"https:\/\/paulmaiorana.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21870\/revisions\/21876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulmaiorana.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulmaiorana.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulmaiorana.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}