| > A feature is something that really belongs or can easily be built into something that already exists. Such a loose definition that really can be bent to fit whatever point you want to make. Forbes is a feature not a product, Apple could provide the content themselves and people would just get it on their iPhone, who needs a seperate company creating it? Gmail is a feature not a product, it belongs in your phone's operating system or in a product such as MS Office. Realistically feature vs. product is subjective, it is entirely down to whether users want to use a seperate service on an integrated one. To move away from the web startup world, how about satnav systems as an example. We all know they can be built into cars, and that's been happening for a while, and for those cars that have them, it is certainly a feature of the car. That hasn't killed the companies selling dedicated systems, such as TomTom. Or for computer hardware, speakers are really just a feature of your computer, not a seperate product, yet people still buy speakers that aren't a part of their PC, just connected to them. Both these examples, it is possible to get them as features rather than products, but the demand for standalone products has kept them in existance. |