At Starbucks, people make a lot of choices because they often have opinions about how coffee-like drinks taste best. People spend their whole lives refining the

At Starbucks, people make a lot of choices because they often have opinions about how coffee-like drinks taste best. People spend their whole lives refining the idea of what food and drink is good, and it's virtually impossible to LIVE and to not be a view on the subject. Most people don't like making decisions about computers, and just want the most basic solution that gets what they want done. Excel is a complicate piece of software, but that's because it's the only way to solve the problems of enough of the market to make it the standard. On the other hand, chat rooms, calendars, and file sharing are something that can work for almost everyone without a whole lot of options, as long as you're willing to conform your workflow to that of the tool. Since there are no "file sharing software experts" (your expertise is in creating the file; sharing it is just something you have to do afterward), software without opinions like the kind Joel is advocating will probably do poorly in this space.