[marcosdumay]

One has to keep in mind the Microsoft Word paradox: 99% of the people have no use for any single feature of yours, but when you have 600 of those removing them means that every single one of your users will miss something and will look into something that does it.

That of course doesn't mean that both it's perfectly fine to have a niche product that perfectly solves a problem few people have, some features really aren't used by anybody. It's just that things are not always simple.

[Baeocystin]

I've heard this many times, and it does ring at least somewhat true in my experience, but does anyone have a link to actual studies relating to this?

I get the feeling that the 'people using feature x' curve follows a power law with rapid dropoff rather than a more linear shape, but that's just intuition, and I'd like to calibrate against known data.

[davidjnelson]

I hit this with the gsuite gmail redesign. They used to have a button to set up catch all emails. They removed it and the alternative is a ui with tons of options but nothing simple for that use case. So, a solution is to keep easy stuff easy which runs the advanced config behind the scenes, but also have the advanced config available for power users sitting behind an “Advanced” screen.

[empath75]

Having a plug-in system like atom is much better than trying to account for every possible use case.

[marcosdumay]

Well, mostly. But it completely fails when there is any social element to the software (even exchanging save-files).

[amelius]

It's basically a "long tail" of features. It's why people shop at Amazon, and not at their local bookstore.

[Gibbon1]

I think that is also Netflix vs Blockbuster. Netflix had no problem with showing you some odd French Film from the 1950's.

I do think that the rise Amazon + Big Box Store + Offshoring meant resulted the disappearance of the power of distribution buyers. Manufacturers typically sell into a distribution chain. Old school the buyers in that chain would enforce some standard of quality. AKA their were a couple of of buyers for the various distributors that knew every model of toilet brush on the market. And if a model sucked they wouldn't order any it no mater how cheap it was.