It seems popular these days to say that we should be doing less. Producing products with less features and under-doing competition. The problem is, this sounds good but it does not work. I am not aware of any single company that did less and succeeded. They might say they are doing less, but if you watch what is being done, truth is everyone is adding more.
Take a look at what has been added to iPhone over last 3 years: Compass, video recording, whole application store, more memory, more processing power, more of everything. Not less. And just wait for next version. There will be even more added. I don’t think they would be investing all the resources into new functionality if that was not directly related to increased sales.
Is your car doing less than 10 years ago? Does VS.NET 2010 have less features than VS.NET 2008 and would you buy it if they actually removed what you use or kept everything the same? I don’t think so.
Any successful product to stay relevant to its users must add more, it must improve and evolve. It is what customers demand. In last 10 years we have not received a single request to remove features from our products, but we have received thousands of requests to add features to the product.
This is normal. There is nothing wrong with more. People find new uses and needs in the products they like. And if you don’t give it to them, they will go and get them somewhere else. Simple as that. You choose.
Some equate the less with easy to use, but that is not the case. Less may lead to easy to use, but feature rich product can be easy to use too. I have no doubt which one wins: feature rich easy to use product indeed.
So doing less as an idea sounds attractive. As marketing point it sounds good and it gets mind-share. But when you turn around and look at what’s actually being done, everyone is busy adding more.
This is very true! User needs more and more features then what is available.
Hitesh
Well this very much depend on what we are referring to when we say “Do less”… with the perspective you set up, your quite obviously correct.
However try to consider another perspective, when we where I work talks about “Doing less” it is more the aim to provide the user with e.g. 5 working features rather than 25 buggy ones.
This is at least my thought, ofc. we all puts more and more into our products, but packing your product with features with no concern for the quality of them is a dead road as well.
Oh yeah, I agree completely. First comes quality work so you do as much as you can. But invariably, people want more. They find new uses for your product. They find better ways to use your product and you have to adapt…
Yes, as I said in time we will all put more into the product, that was not what was challenged, it was more what was meant when we say “do less”. Because where I work we say that all the time, but it is never in the context you refer to.
And I have also never heard anyone saying cutting features could be a good thing, in fact I always hear it as the worst thing you can ever do, ones the user has gotten a feature, you can’t cut it away again without the user raising questions.