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Yes, it's argument from the classic "80/20 myth" post by Joel Spolsky (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/a
by catwell 11y ago
Yes, it's argument from the classic "80/20 myth" post by Joel Spolsky (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html). The more people you want to reach with your software, the more bloated it has to become to be successful. The only choices are to accept and embrace that fact, or split the feature set and write variations on the software aimed at different niches.
- lmm 11y agoI think it's possible to write opinionated software; often it turns out that those must-have features aren't actually must-have at all. Joel's own Trello is a good example of something that severely limits its functionality compared to its competitors, and ends up much better as a result.
- catwell 11y agoIt works because he is targeting a subset of all users. He is willing to give up on some potential customers who want some features that the product does not offer. He is also willing to lose actual customers who outgrow the product to competition. I think it works because he hasn't yet reached the critical mass of users when it doesn't. It is probably a good strategy ("do things that don't scale"). GitHub did the same thing, by the way. Remember slide 56 of this slide deck from 2011: https://speakerdeck.com/holman/how-github-uses-github-to-build-github https://speakerdeck.com/holman/how-github-uses-github-to-bui...? Since then a lot happened, including https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github. Regarding another of Joel's products, this was the top comment on the HN thread "Why Fogbugz lost to Jira": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10314403 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10314403