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

planas <jslozier@gmail.com> writes:

> 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.

Which features 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.

There you go: When you need a particular feature, you must have it. When
you need it, it is totally irrelevant how often you or other users use
it.

How often a feature is used and/or how many users use it doesn´t say
anything about how important the feature is. When someone needs it, it
has to be there.

> 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.

What´s worse? Having features you don´t need often or not at all in the
software you use or having to look for other software you don´t use and
that has the particular feature (and maybe not others) you happen to
need (maybe only once ever) and use that instead?

And what about one of the most important features: being able to create
a text or a spreadsheet or a presentation or some other kind of document
you can still use 20 or 60 years later?

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