There were two components to this: visual, and technical. And they overlap. I’m going to also try to make this non-technical with a metaphor so you can understand more easily (helps me too!).
For visual, I don’t know what to say other than that design moves forward. Just how cars, houses, TVs, phones, and the McDonalds logo are all different today than they were 50 years ago, ALL design changes (except for Jimmy Buffet Margaritaville restaurants - those will NEVER change!!). Anyway, this is purely subjective though, and difficult to use as justification as there will always be people who prefer the current versions of things (out of personal preference or familiarity). Regardless, design moves on. And most people adapt immediately or eventually, which is why everything today looks different than 50 years ago, and everything in 20 years will look different that today. Buttons used to be bigger, rounder, and had gradients and shadows. Now they are more squared and single flat color. In 20 years maybe website buttons will look like courderoy - who knows. But design unquestionably moves forward, and the majority moves with it (except Jimmy Buffet fans - Hawaain print shirts forever!!).
The next issue is technical. Chess.com (and all websites/apps) is basically two things: data (information), and a client (a web page or mobile app). The data is on servers, and the client is downloaded to your browser or phone and interfaces with the data.
Imagine that you run a dentists office. People come in, get their teeth worked on, then you write down what happened in their file, and they leave. Now imagine you’ve been doing that for 20 years. Now imagine that computers come around. Now you can more quickly enter their information to a computer which stores everything faster, longer, and easier. And, imagine that you start realizing that most dental patients want a different environment - quieter cleaning devices, better flavored junk they put on your teeth, TVs above the table, whatever. You decide to rent a bigger office next door and then build a bigger, newer facility. You also install the new computerized file system to store their records.
When you open the doors, after many months most of your clients love the changes. But some don’t. They like the previous office. So, you keep it open for a while. It requires extra staff, and, when someone comes in to get their work done in the old office, you have to manually write down their records, AND then go enter it into the computer. Also, in order to have records for the people visiting the old office, even people who go to the new office have to have their records written down on paper so the old office has them. This is a lot of work and prone to errors.
You keep encouraging your dental clients to visit the new office. Most of them eventually switch. You have 1000 patients, and 980 of them are now using the new office. But there are 20 who hate the color blue, and don’t like TVs above the dental chair. They say yellow is a much better color, and that the TVs give them a headache.
But your new office has attracted even MORE customers. You are working hard to keep up with 1200 clients. Your staff is stretched thin trying to serve the new customers, and the old you have people running back and forth between offices. You are having trouble keeping your files in sync because you are using both paper records and digital files. Your find yourself spending an inordinate amount of time trying to handle the concerns of those 20 other clients, many of whom still keep coming, but are increasingly frustrated, or rude (see comment directly above).
What do you do? 20 of your customers would advise you to shut down the new office and just go back to the old office which hasn’t nicer yellow walls, and they were used to the office layout and where the bathrooms were, and the different magazines on the waiting room table. 1200 of your customers are now either completely unaware that you ever had a second office, or have forgotten about it.
If you were a hard-nosed jerk, or “proud”, you’d just say “tough luck” to those 20 and move on, focusing on your thousands of other happy clients.
If you were an empathetic, caring, and loyal business owner you would feel a tremendous amount of grief and sadness that you can’t make everyone happy. Maybe you would even spend 30 minutes of your precious Saturday morning typing out a metaphor that only 5 of those people might read - because you care.
I cant run two offices. The interfaces are not compatible. The data is not compatible. It was making everything twice as hard. And almost everyone has moved on, and V3 - according to all of our numbers and metrics - has been better than we even imagined.
That’s where all of our resources are going. And we are super excited about our plans going forward.
To those of you who sincerely miss V2 - I’m sorry. We’re in a new office now.
From the managment point of view, has anyone any idea why some of the features of V2 could not be restored?
Is it pride, obstinacy? That would be bad.
Is it financial?. I could understand that. The site does want to make as good a profit as it can.
Is it technical? Meaning V3 is incompatible completely and utterly with the way V2 operated.
Has it something to do with Java? If so, what are the issues.
Any answers?