Voice assistants are wide software. In the industry we call it the ‘long tail’ of functionality. There are hundreds of ‘tasks’ that your Alexa or Google assistant can perform for you. You probably don’t know that most of them even exist. But not knowing that these tasks exist costs you nothing. The fact that you can buy pizzas via Alexa has no impact on your ability to get news briefs. You can do either without ever engaging with the other.
This ‘long tail’ attribute makes voice assistants extremely wide software. Alexa can do hundreds of things which could be stand alone applications. But the trade off is that voice assistants are extremely vast and don’t do anything particularly well. Over the time the ‘main’ functionalities will be refined and optimized. But Voice assistants will always suffer from the ‘long tail’ problem in that they have extremely wide feature sets.
Wide software spreads across multiple domains. More domains means leaky abstractions and mapping software.
Deep software focuses on a single domain. Perhaps it is an order book or a workflow execution engine. Deep software has a clear purpose and domain. Wide software does everything.
Over time deep software converges on clean abstractions and easy to understand code. Wide software on the other hand is never finished. Wide software is naturally expansive. There is always a reason to add a new functionality to a voice assistant. And in fact there is no real barrier to entry. Adding a new functionality to a voice assistant is a net positive to the system as a whole. The negatives of adding a new domain are already baked in and many customers will enjoy the new functionality.
Deep software can be finished. It can solve a problem in one domain and be done. Hadoop is an example. No one has heard about miraculous developments in HDFS this decade. Hadoop is essentially feature complete and in maintenance mode. In reality development continues, but is it really new stuff or refinements?
Wide software cannot be ‘finished’. Wide software is an infinite sinkhole. Adding more code makes the sinkhole more valuable so more code keeps getting added. There is no real way to ‘solve’ the problems of wide software. You can partition wide software such that each domain exists separately. But if you allow one domain to reference another, now you are back into the pit.
Software Leviathans which I’ve discussed in another post (https://www.sledgeworx.io/software-leviathans/) are wide software. Supporting more domains typically increases the value of the leviathan as a whole. A voice assistant which can order dry cleaning is better than an assistant that can’t order dry cleaning. Overall there isn’t a trade off between the two. One has an additional ‘ability’ with no downside to adding that ability. You would have to make a voice assistant that only handled one domain to escape this constraint.
Wide Software isn’t magical. Wide software does too many things to be incredible at any of them. Since there are countless features the team has to spend a lot of time making sure they don’t break anything. In software leviathans not breaking things is particularly difficult because nobody actually knows what all the features are.
Since wide software is always being pushed to add something new. Energy and design focus are constantly shifted towards new features and problem domains. New domains expect old domains to support new features.
Wide software suffers another problem which is that even if some domains in the project are invested in continually say music for example. Even if music functionality is iterated on again and again. That particular domain being awesome doesn’t change the flavor of the beast. It is still a ball of mud, dirt, rocks, etc.