For the same reason a restaurant puts more food on your plate than your appetite can take: to make more money out of the same sale. One meal on your plate, one in a box. The kitchen is competing with whoever would have fed you tomorrow.
Function creep and bloat exist for three reasons. The first is the sales motive. The average business-software company now spends about as much selling its product as building it, roughly twenty-three cents of every revenue dollar on sales and marketing against twenty-two on research and development.[1] When the selling engine is that large, every new feature becomes one more thing to advertise, demo, and print on the box. Features pile up whether anyone needs them or not. The second reason is that intellectual property is hard to protect in software, so a vendor stays ahead by adding what a rival has not yet copied. The third is simply that it can: a PC has processing power to waste.
The result shows up the moment anyone measures which of those features people actually use. Studying a year of real usage across the software of more than six hundred companies, the analytics firm Pendo found that eighty percent of the features in the average product are rarely or never used. A mere twelve percent of those features account for eighty percent of the daily use.[2] Most of what is built, sold, and maintained simply sits there.
The newest twist is that the features you will never use now arrive with a higher bill. In 2026, Microsoft folded its Copilot artificial-intelligence assistant into Microsoft 365 and raised the price of most commercial plans by about sixteen percent, whether a given business had asked for the assistant or not.[3] That assistant reaches across your inbox, your calendar, and your documents, which is worth a plain question before it is switched on: who can now read all of that, and how would you know? Scope creep of this kind is the restaurant's extra plate, served to every table and added to every check: the move of an incumbent that already owns the room, not of a newcomer trying to enter it.
Simplicity is the newcomer's advantage, not the cloud's. Web, cloud, and mobile challengers won their early customers by being lighter: thinner clients, newer development tools, and business models that did not depend on stuffing the box. As incumbents grow in size and complexity, newcomers must grow in innovation and simplicity, and yesterday's lean upstart so reliably becomes tomorrow's crowded incumbent.
The purest case is open source, where scope creep has no sales motive behind it at all. No revenue rides on differentiating features, and none on the satisfaction of dubious peripheral needs, so there is nothing to pad. The emphasis falls instead on clarity, simplicity, modularity, and robustness. Fewer moving parts mean easier setup, better interoperability, better scalability, and easier troubleshooting.
There is more pull than push in open source. It wins the day not because it chases profit but because it answers a real need. By putting that need first, programmers collaboratively design the best product they can, for themselves, their employers, and everyone downstream. From Google to Tesla, the most successful technology firms build on open source and share much of their own intellectual property: Chrome and Edge, Kubernetes, Docker, TensorFlow, PyTorch.
We build the same way, and for the same reason. Our Stewards choose the fewest moving parts that will do a client's job, strip the features that were sold rather than needed, and keep an estate lean enough that every part of it earns its place. The measure we hold each tool to is not everything it could do, but what it will do for the business, and what the rest quietly costs to carry.
Concierge CIO Partners is a unified Guild of senior technologists providing dedicated, long-term fiduciary IT leadership to midmarket service firms. It offers a strategic alternative to fragile internal IT silos and to Managed Service Providers who advise you on what to buy and are paid on what you buy. With transparent unit pricing and an automated service catalog, the Guild eliminates administrative bloat and ensures every IT dollar spent and decision made directly drives your financial performance. Software is sold with more than any one business needs; the Guild's job is to see that you run, and pay for, only the part that does the work.
[1] Sales and marketing versus R&D spend: SaaS Capital, 2026 Spending Benchmarks. [2] Feature usage: Pendo, 2019 Feature Adoption Report. [3] Copilot bundled and prices raised about 16% on average from 1 July 2026: Microsoft 365 Blog, 4 Dec 2025; average increase per CIO Dive.