Posted by Nick Mehta on Fri, Aug 01, 2008 @ 09:16 AM
David Ferris at the Ferris Research blog has written a quick post on LiveOffice and the trade-offs of having tons of functionality versus ensuring usability.
I find the ad salesforce.com is running in magazines to be the best description of how SaaS vendors should think about product development.
Salesforce.com shows a napkin that has a big circle drawn on it with "all CRM functionality" written inside and a smaller intersecting circle with "all CRM functionality you actually use" which is what they then focus on.
SaaS is about building software where the features actually get used by everyone rather than having a bunch of features that most people don't use and which clutter up and confuse the experience for everyone else.
Obviously for super-complex mega-companies, that may not be enough, but for the typical business or organization, it's all about the 80/20 rule.