I knew I would rile folks by contrasting poor delivery in the enterprise software market to the explosive growth of 50,000 apps in the iPhone ecosystem. Sure enough in the comments several people talk derisively of those apps and how much more complex enterprise apps are. Of course, many of the iPhone apps are juvenile.
But even in enterprise software 20% of features deliver 80% of value. So do we mock underutilized features?
In the iPhone ecosystem, the market will drive worthless apps into oblivion. In enterprise software, poor customers continue to pay for worthless features because they are part of the “standard release”, and then pay for upgrade after upgrade of a mountain of those features.
It could change with SaaS. Those vendors get real-time visibility on which features are most utilized by their customer base and where to continue to make investments.
But even there be it would be nice to have customers vote for features with their dollars, as they will in the iPhone App Store.
