Have you ever needed WiFi on your sunglasses?
You might have seen DuckDuckGo’s recent product collaboration. A product that does exactly what you expect it to do: sunglasses that protect you from the sun. No WiFi, no AI, no camera. Just normal sunglasses, and DuckDuckGo isn’t shy about saying so.
But what is the link to mosa.cloud, you would think?
Most of your software contains features you never use, need, or want
Here’s an interesting stat: Pendo’s 2019 Feature Adoption Report, based on real usage data across hundreds of software products, found that 80% of features in the average software product are rarely or never used. A quarter of them are never touched at all. Meanwhile, just 12% of features generate 80% of all daily usage. And building and maintaining those features costs a lot of money and effort.
Think about that. Most of what’s in your tools isn’t for you, or for anyone.
And yet those features aren’t free. They add loading time, clutter menus, and give products that unmistakable sense of heaviness. They can do things you don’t want (like, the sunglasses). They can break, or leak data.
Companies keep adding more, but users don’t get much happier. More features don’t mean better products. Often, they mean the opposite…
Your time is being taxed
Take your email client, any of the big ones. How much of it do you actually use? In our experience helping teams set up their tools, most people use maybe a quarter of what’s available, and they get their work done just fine.
The problem isn’t what’s missing. It’s everything that’s there but shouldn’t be, for you. Smart features you never configured. Integrations you never asked for. Filters you set up years ago that now need maintenance just to stay relevant. Every AI assistant, sidebar, and studio added on top makes the product more capable on paper, and heavier in practice.
Researchers call this cognitive load: mental energy spent navigating complexity that doesn’t serve you.
None of this means the big products are bad. Gmail, for instance, is a genuinely great tool and that’s exactly why billions of people use it. But greatness at scale comes with a cost, and that cost is worth understanding.
Why this keeps happening (and won’t stop)
Some forces make it nearly inevitable:
The incentive structure rewards building, not removing. Product managers get promoted for shipping new features, not for retiring old ones. Engineers are evaluated on what they built, not what they simplified. Sales teams need something new to talk about. The whole system is built to add, almost never to subtract.
Success becomes ballast. When hundreds of millions of people use your product, every feature has someone who depends on it. Removing anything means breaking someone’s workflow. Mature products aren’t bloated because their makers are careless - they’re bloated because they’re trapped by their own success. It’s a constraint that new products simply don’t have.
What you actually need: speed as a feature
You want to check your email, not wait for it to load. You want to write a document, not fight an interface. Speed isn’t a luxury, it’s table stakes. Everything should feel like a snap.
Lightweight products are fast precisely because they carry less. Less to load means quicker startup. Less to render means smoother scrolling. Less to maintain means fewer bugs.
This isn’t about doing less. It’s about doing the right things exceptionally well. One thing done perfectly beats a hundred things done halfway.
Design that works, not impresses
The best compliment a product can get isn’t “wow, look at everything it does.” It’s “everything I need, nothing I don’t.”
We know, because it’s the feedback we hear most about our own mail client. Not the feature set, not the technology underneath, but the interface. People tell us it’s clean, that it’s obvious, that they didn’t need a manual.
That’s the power of good design: clarity. When a product feels clean, you don’t mind opening it. When it solves your problem without friction, you actually enjoy using it.
And accessibility isn’t just a checkbox. If everyone can use your product without a manual, you’ve succeeded. If it looks clean and works fast, you’re already ahead of most of the competition.
A new generation, built without baggage
This is where it gets interesting: new products have an advantage no amount of money can buy. They don’t carry fifteen years of legacy. They can build exactly what works, test it with real users, and skip everything else.
Take modern email protocols like JMAP. Instead of IMAP, a standard that dates back to 1986, JMAP was designed for how we actually work today:
- Email that syncs efficiently, even on spotty mobile connections
- Shared mailboxes that work the way you’d expect
- Email, files, and calendar that connect seamlessly instead of being bolted together
The same philosophy applies to AI. Instead of sprinkling AI into every corner of the product, add the one thing that genuinely helps. For email, that’s AI-powered filters that organise your inbox from a plain-language rule: “if I get email from X, put it in folder Y.”
No configuration maze, no endless menus. It works because it solves a real problem without adding complexity.
That’s not a limitation. That’s focus.
Back to basics
More isn’t better. Better is better.
The future belongs to products that respect your time and attention. Products that load instantly. Products that do exactly what you need, without forcing you to learn what you don’t.
The established players can’t easily offer this. Not because they don’t want to, but because their age won’t let them. Alternatives can, because they get to start with a blank page and one question: what do people actually need?
So ask yourself: how much of your tools do you really use? How many features are just in your way?
The answer might surprise you. And it might make you wonder what a better way looks like.
At mosa.cloud, we’re building differently. Starting fresh. Focusing on what matters: speed, simplicity, and tools that actually work. Because sometimes the best innovation is leaving things out.