[lqdc13]

The other side of the coin is that there are many products that lack that one feature that makes me not use them or makes me less interested in using them.

Example is sorting products by some variable or filtering products by some property. If I can't do that, that means I have to write a greasemonkey script and it is much easier to go to a competitor.

[ChuckMcM]

The challenging sales cycle (if there is one) is this, "If this feature were added, would you commit to using this product?" that question is hard to ask and answer in a web based freemium world. In the enterprise sales cycle I've seen customers decline to buy 'for lack of a feature' and having that be a way to say "no" without explicitly saying no. When I worked closely with the enterprise account teams at NetApp that was always something to consider.

[ryandrake]

That's a good way to qualify features, too, so you don't end up building a Franken-product full of half-baked ideas from people who aren't even paying customers.

Bad salesperson: "Here's a laundry list of features that people say that they'd want in our product. Go off and implement them to make my job easier."

Good salesperson: "I have a firm commitment from Company Abc that they'll buy a 5,000 seat license if we implement this one feature. Is this a worthwhile investment?"

[alextgordon]

I like: "Dangling by a Trivial Feature" http://prog21.dadgum.com/160.html

[ams6110]

And related, removing a feature will almost certainly cause you to lose some users. And since users are hard to acquire, this is a big deal.