Comment by graemep

Not just that, it was Excel a quarter of a century ago.

I am not even sure it was still true by the time her wrote it. It think that there is a set of core features (laying out stuff in a table, simple formulae) and some very commonly used features (e.g. graphs, data filtering) and a long tail of less commonly used advanced features (pivot tables, database like formulae like VLOOKUP).

Its more like 80% of users only use the same subset. Less commonly used stiff is important to the people who do use them, so you need it to sustain the network effects and enterprise sales.