Comment by piker
6 hours ago
> It was a cliche for many years that Microsoft Word had "too many features." So people would start companies to sell "lightweight word processors" that only implemented "the most used 20% of features." And most of these companies sank without a trace (with a couple of admirable exceptions that hyperfocused on specific niches). Google finally made progress against the monopoly, but to it, they actually invested in a huge number of features.
The other issue is that yes, perhaps most users only use 20% of the features, but each user uses a different 20% of the features in products like Word. Trust me, it's super hard to get it right even at the end-user level, let alone the enterprise level like you say.
There are at most 5% of the features of word that are common to everyone. Things like spell check everyone uses. Actually I suspect it is more like 0.1% of the features are common, and most people use about 0.3% of the features and power users get up to 5% of the features - but I don't have data, just a guess.
Yeah but 98% of Word features were buried in like 2004. They were added when it was a selling point to use unicorn and gnome icons as your table border in under 100mb of RAM. So we’re talking about 20% of the limited set of features that remain not just for backwards compatibility.
And there's some company out there that has very important Word documents that will fail to open if you take away the unicorn and gnome icons table border feature.