>There may not be much variation within a particular customer's preferences, but there is a great deal of variation between the preferences of different custome

>There may not be much variation within a particular customer's preferences, but there is a great deal of variation between the preferences of different customers. >Eliminating choices might make things simpler for some customers but it will also shrink your market by alienating those customers whose preferences differ from your new standard offering. That's true, but its not clear cut that its a loss. I mean, lets take everyone's favorite poster child for this: Apple. I personally refuse to use Apple products for precisely the reason you describe - they simply don't accommodate my preferences. However, the fact that Apple products do not accommodate the preferences of people like me has had a negligible impact on their success. Why is that? Its because the majority of the variation in preferences occurs in a minority of the market. In other words, there's a small population of people like me, who have widely varying preferences and a large population of people whose preferences are similar enough to be served by a device with limited features. From Apple's perspective, people like me aren't worth the expense - its much more profitable to drop the features used by the minority in order to hone and polish the features used by the majority. Sure, Apple will never have me as a customer. From their perspective, that's an acceptable trade-off, since the effort required in building features to attract me isn't worth the opportunity cost.