2 ms·

I am a big fan of simplicity, but I recently realized that I was going too far. It is hard to make money by just concentrating on simplicity. Most cash-cows are

by nadam 16y ago

I am a big fan of simplicity, but I recently realized that I was going too far. It is hard to make money by just concentrating on simplicity. Most cash-cows are really complex beasts. See Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, Oracle. If the emphasis of your product is simplicity, chances are you have to compete with free software. Joel had a presentation on this: there are dozens of simple bug trackers out there, lots of them are free, but still only a few companies make big money in the field, and their products are not the simplest ones. I still value simplicity, it is just risky if that is the main value proposition of a product. Also there is simplicity on the user's side and there is simplicity on the engineering side. Sometimes it implies incredibly complex and hard engineering work to enable simplicity on the user's side. Although UX is the king, I've realized that sometimes you have to make compromises even in UX to keep the underlying technology not extremely complex.

marknutter 16y ago
> Most cash-cows are really complex beasts. See Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, Oracle I would argue that these products are cash cows not because they're complex, but because they were created and marketed at the right time and place. In fact, I would argue that these products became complex after having become cash cows, after which adding features was no longer constrained by time or budget. Microsoft Office is amazingly bloated, for instance. I would argue that 95% of its users only ever use 5% of the features.
- Dn_Ab 16y ago
  What I wonder is, what is the coverage of features used by Every User? It seems unlikely that every user uses the same 5% of features. Thus the question is, does there exist some set of equivalence classes of feature usage across Office users that is bijective with the set of Office Features? And if not to which degree does it fail to be surjective. This would be a (silly) measure of how much users drive Office's evolution and how much its just a bunch of people thinking up nonsense to fatten up the feature list.

by nadam 16y ago

marknutter 16y ago

> Most cash-cows are really complex beasts. See Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, Oracle I would argue that these products are cash cows not because they're complex, but because they were created and marketed at the right time and place. In fact, I would argue that these products became complex after having become cash cows, after which adding features was no longer constrained by time or budget. Microsoft Office is amazingly bloated, for instance. I would argue that 95% of its users only ever use 5% of the features.

Dn_Ab 16y ago
What I wonder is, what is the coverage of features used by Every User? It seems unlikely that every user uses the same 5% of features. Thus the question is, does there exist some set of equivalence classes of feature usage across Office users that is bijective with the set of Office Features? And if not to which degree does it fail to be surjective. This would be a (silly) measure of how much users drive Office's evolution and how much its just a bunch of people thinking up nonsense to fatten up the feature list.