4 ms·

>"Nobody uses more than 5% of its features, but every company uses a different 5%." >The saying is apocryphal and unlikely to be accurate Well its mathematica

>"Nobody uses more than 5% of its features, but every company uses a different 5%." >The saying is apocryphal and unlikely to be accurate Well its mathematically impossible to be accurate as soon as you have > 20 users.

robertlagrant 5y ago
A better counterexample is that one user could use all features. But your statement doesn't make sense; there might be millions of features, and trillions of ways to combine them to make 5%.
KronisLV 5y ago
> Well its mathematically impossible to be accurate as soon as you have > 20 users. It's probably in the semantics. Text input and editing is clearly a part of functionality that's probably used by everyone (or at least most users), so it's not possible for "different 5%" to mean what you're alluding to, maybe the phrasing needs work. In any given 5% there might be 1-4% of overlap with what others are using and the remainder of that is specific to the company.
- grog454 5y ago
  And the greater the degree of overlap the weaker the implicit argument. If it's a uniform distribution of discrete features then each feature is equally "important" and worth equal resources and dev time. If 81/100 companies use the exact same 5% of features and the remaining 19 cover the remaining 95%, then all else equal you can probably drop 95% of your features and still do well.
  - a4isms 5y ago
    The dynamics of the Enterprise market are such that there are features where having just one customer that will make a buy/no-buy decision based on just one feature will deliver enough incremental ARR to justify the opportunity cost of doing that feature instead of a bunch of others. Typically you do the most popular features first, but most Enterprise vendors end up working on a long tail of niche features that nevertheless are profitable. There's a long conversation to be had about how this ends up being a trap where Enterprise software gets bloated and shitty and eventually gets disrupted by a small vendor that does "less," but in a powerful, transformative way that obsoletes the Enterprise "standard," which leads us back to discussing Atlassian :-) They're a good example of this dynamic, because they have a "constellation" of products to sell. So if they build a niche feature that gets a new customer to buy Jira seats, having "landed" in the account, their salespeople can "expand" by selling OpsGenie and other related products very profitably.
moonbooth 5y ago
Only if you assume the 5% of features to be a contiguous block each time. However, if we assume there are, say, 100 features in Word (the real number is likely much higher), the number of combinations is orders of magnitude higher than 20.
shukantpal 5y ago
False. If you have 100 features, there are nCr(100, 5) combinations of 5% features = 75287520.
- a4isms 5y ago
  If it's no more than 5% of the features, it's actually n-choose-k(100,5) + n-choose-k(100,4) + n-choose-k(100,3) + n-choose-k(100,2) + 100! 75,287,520 + 3,921,225 + 161,700 + 4,950 + 100 ------------ 79,375,495
deleted 5y ago
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robertlagrant 5y ago

A better counterexample is that one user could use all features. But your statement doesn't make sense; there might be millions of features, and trillions of ways to combine them to make 5%.

KronisLV 5y ago

> Well its mathematically impossible to be accurate as soon as you have > 20 users. It's probably in the semantics. Text input and editing is clearly a part of functionality that's probably used by everyone (or at least most users), so it's not possible for "different 5%" to mean what you're alluding to, maybe the phrasing needs work. In any given 5% there might be 1-4% of overlap with what others are using and the remainder of that is specific to the company.

grog454 5y ago
And the greater the degree of overlap the weaker the implicit argument. If it's a uniform distribution of discrete features then each feature is equally "important" and worth equal resources and dev time. If 81/100 companies use the exact same 5% of features and the remaining 19 cover the remaining 95%, then all else equal you can probably drop 95% of your features and still do well.
- a4isms 5y ago
  The dynamics of the Enterprise market are such that there are features where having just one customer that will make a buy/no-buy decision based on just one feature will deliver enough incremental ARR to justify the opportunity cost of doing that feature instead of a bunch of others. Typically you do the most popular features first, but most Enterprise vendors end up working on a long tail of niche features that nevertheless are profitable. There's a long conversation to be had about how this ends up being a trap where Enterprise software gets bloated and shitty and eventually gets disrupted by a small vendor that does "less," but in a powerful, transformative way that obsoletes the Enterprise "standard," which leads us back to discussing Atlassian :-) They're a good example of this dynamic, because they have a "constellation" of products to sell. So if they build a niche feature that gets a new customer to buy Jira seats, having "landed" in the account, their salespeople can "expand" by selling OpsGenie and other related products very profitably.

moonbooth 5y ago

Only if you assume the 5% of features to be a contiguous block each time. However, if we assume there are, say, 100 features in Word (the real number is likely much higher), the number of combinations is orders of magnitude higher than 20.

shukantpal 5y ago

False. If you have 100 features, there are nCr(100, 5) combinations of 5% features = 75287520.

a4isms 5y ago
If it's no more than 5% of the features, it's actually n-choose-k(100,5) + n-choose-k(100,4) + n-choose-k(100,3) + n-choose-k(100,2) + 100! 75,287,520 + 3,921,225 + 161,700 + 4,950 + 100 ------------ 79,375,495

deleted 5y ago

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