Re: [libreoffice-users] MSO's 80/20 rule: 80% of the people use about 20% of the functionality.

Lee,

On Fri, 2011-06-17 at 21:42 +0200, lee wrote:

> planas <jslozier@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > I believe that the 80/20 is somewhat misleading. As noted earlier must
> > use approximately 20% but not the same 20%.
> >
> > I would estimate that somewhere around 50% of all the features are used
> > reasonably often and the rest are rarely used.
>
> There are substantial features 100% of the users use, aren´t there?
> What´s the percentage of such substantial features compared to all
> features?
>
> If substantial features make for 20%, you would have 80% percent of all
> features of which 50% are rarely used. If I´m not mistaken, that makes
> already 60% of all features used reasonably often. When you need to make
> a package that provides 60% of all available features, you might find
> that there´s another 20% or 30% of all available features that need to
> be packaged as well because of dependencies.
>
> When you need to package 80--90% of all features anyway, how
> important is it to put effort into packaging only 10--20% of all
> features seperately?

The current problem is we do not have any good information of what
features are not very important and do not extend the functionality for
all but a few users. The question is what mix of included and extensible
features should be available beyond those that are important. One of the
problems is you need either a lot different users surveyed at the same
time or smaller number surveyed over a longer period of time. For
example, most of the time I do not use a table of contents in my
documents but when I need the feature I must have it. How many people
need this feature irregularly versus those that often use it? I do not
know. 

Another problem is I do not know how easy or difficult it is write the
code of specific features. I suspect some are very straightforward while
others require a much deeper knowledge of the program.

One of the marketing tricks is tout all the features you have in your
package without regard to how useful many are to all but a handful of
users. Look carefully at some the commercial software ads and notice how
often they tout features that look nice but you probably will never use.

-- 
Jay Lozier
jslozier@gmail.com

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