Design by committee is a wry, derogatory term referring to the style of design that sometimes results when a group of entities comes together to produce something, particularly in the absence of good leadership - roughly equivalent to the age-old expression, "too many cooks spoil the broth". Its defining characteristics are needless complexity, internal inconsistency, banality, and the lack of a unifying vision.

The term is especially common in technical parlance. Software products and standards designed by committee often do too many things or have parts that fit together poorly (because the entities who produced those parts were unaware of each other's requirements for a good fit). For example, the Mozilla Application Suite was often derided for lacking a single vision, thus allowing the software to become bloated and goal-less as code was added by too many contributors. The more focused Firefox browser eventually became the Mozilla project's flagship product largely because of a stricter control over what code was allowed to be added. The Mozilla Application Suite (originally known as Mozilla, marketed as the Mozilla Suite, and code named Seamonkey) is a free, cross-platform internet suite, whose components include a web browser, an e-mail and news client, an HTML editor, and an IRC client. ... Mozilla Firefox is a free, open source, cross-platform, graphical web browser developed by the Mozilla Corporation and hundreds of volunteers. ... The Mozilla Organization (mozilla. ...

The C trigraph is an excellent example. This much-hated feature was added by a standardization committee to get standardization votes from countries that didn't always use the normal ASCII characterset. Since actually using trigraphs makes the C language fairly unreadable, they are not used in practice. The language is left with an ugly complexity that serves nobody. In the C family of programming languages a trigraph is a sequence of three characters that represents a single character, the first two of which are both question marks. ...

The C++ language shows strong evidence of design by committee. Very few people, if any, are fully aware of all details of the language. C++ (generally pronounced see plus plus) is a general-purpose, high-level programming language. ...

One maxim is that a camel is a horse designed by committee, this has been attributed to Vogue magazine, July 1958 [1] and also to Sir Alec Issigonis.[2] One of Lisa Fonssagrives more than 200 covers on Vogue. ... Sir Alec Arnold Constantine Issigonis KBE FRS (November 18, 1906–October 2, 1988) was a designer of cars, now remembered chiefly for the development of the Austin Mini in 1959. ...