Today at Yahoo! I had the pleasure of hearing Marty Cagan talk about building awesome products and a good question came up. What companies do a good job at scrapping (aka retiring) features? Building features is relatively cheap and easy. Scrapping them after afterwards is very hard. Netflix attempted to retire their Profiles features (allowing users to create profiles and set controls around on how many movies and the types of movies each profile can rent). This did not go over well with their community. Two weeks later they came back and decided to keep it. Now the feature is buried deep into the Account Settings page. This is the right way to do it if you absolutely cannot retire the feature. Here is how the sequence of events played out on the Netflix blog and site:
[Update March 18, 2010: Another example of how hard it is to remove features from NetFlix. I love that they have the fortitude to remove features even if a small and vocal set of users complain.]