Have you explored the feature list of a major video conferencing platform recently? Virtual backgrounds, live transcription, AI meeting summaries, emoji reactions, polls, Q&A panels, whiteboard integration, app marketplaces, recording with smart chapters, noise suppression, filters, gesture recognition...
The list goes on. And on. And for most teaching contexts, you'll use maybe 10% of it.
How We Got Here
Platform bloat isn't accidental. It's the predictable result of market competition.
Every platform is trying to be the one tool that does everything. Sales teams need feature checkboxes. Marketing needs something new to announce. "We now support X" is easier to communicate than "we made our existing features better."
The result is platforms that try to serve everyone: enterprise corporate meetings, webinars to thousands, small team standups, online education, telehealth appointments, virtual events. Each use case gets its features, and those features pile up.
The Cost of Bloat
Feature bloat isn't free. It costs in several ways:
Complexity: More features means more menus, more settings, more things to learn. Teachers already have enough to manage without navigating labyrinthine platform interfaces.
Distraction: Features compete for attention. The thing you need is buried among things you don't. Finding the right button takes longer than it should.
Reliability: More code means more potential bugs. Features interact in unexpected ways. Updates break things that worked before.
Performance: Bloated applications consume more resources. They're slower to load, harder on older devices, more likely to strain bandwidth.
Learning curve: New teachers or students face an overwhelming interface. The platform's capabilities become a barrier rather than an enabler.
What Teachers Actually Use
Ask a working online teacher what they actually need. The list is surprisingly short:
- Reliable video and audio
- Screen sharing
- Breakout rooms that they can actually monitor
- Chat for questions and file sharing
- Recording (sometimes)
- Simple session scheduling
That's essentially it. The core teaching workflow doesn't require AI-generated meeting notes, collaborative whiteboards, or animated emoji reactions.
Yet these features are competing for screen space with the basics. The breakout room controls that teachers use constantly are given the same prominence as features they'll never touch.
The One-Size-Fits-All Problem
The root issue is that general-purpose platforms try to serve vastly different use cases with a single product.
A corporate sales demo has different needs than a primary school class. A medical consultation has different requirements than a webinar to 500 people. Trying to accommodate all of these results in a product that does many things adequately but nothing exceptionally.
For education specifically, this means core teaching features — like proper breakout room monitoring — often receive less development attention than flashier additions.
The Case for Focused Tools
The alternative to bloated general-purpose platforms is tools built for specific use cases.
A platform designed specifically for education can:
- Prioritize features that teachers actually need
- Design interfaces around teaching workflows
- Skip features that don't serve education
- Maintain simplicity because scope is limited
This is why we built Simpleclass to do one thing well: small-group online education. We don't have webinar features because we're not a webinar platform. We don't have corporate meeting features because we're not a corporate meeting platform.
What we do have: breakout room monitoring that actually lets teachers see and hear multiple rooms. Simple session scheduling. Recording that's preset when scheduling, not fumbled with in the moment. Branded spaces for institutions.
The Counter-Argument
There's a reasonable case for general-purpose platforms: familiarity.
Students already know how to use common tools. Parents don't need to learn something new. IT departments have existing support processes. These are real advantages.
The question is whether familiarity outweighs the cost of using tools that aren't quite right for your use case. For occasional online teaching, it probably does. For institutions where online teaching is the core business, the workflow advantages of purpose-built tools often justify the learning curve.
Evaluating Platform Fit
When choosing a platform, consider:
- What features will you actually use daily? Does the platform excel at those specific features?
- What's the complexity cost? How much clutter are you wading through to do basic tasks?
- Is the platform designed for your use case? Or is your use case an afterthought in a product built for something else?
The platform with the longest feature list isn't automatically the best choice. Sometimes less is more — when that "less" is thoughtfully designed for how you actually work.