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Comment by eropple | Hacker News Reader

I can't find the link offhand but I recall it being said by someone affiliated with Office that pretty much everyone uses about 20% of Word's features. The difference is in which 20%.

You might have a set of feature needs that Pages covers. I know that pretty much everyone in my company (that is, management and project people--engineers could get by with whatever, that's not a big deal) couldn't use Pages, and their needs are not extreme or out-there.

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My experience the vast majority of the time trying to get people to change away from Word is not that Pages doesn't have the features they want, but that they have to learn a new way to do it in Pages.

This is not to discount that as a valid issue. Taking time to learn new software is time taken away from the real business of the company.

I think Apple could help itself by having a rather large "I used to use Word, how do I do XXX in Pages?" help section inside of Pages (and Numbers and Keynote, though Keynote probably needs it less).

This is an old concept that Microsoft themselves used in early version of Excel. I remember that there was a way to get early Excel to use the same commands as Lotus 1-2-3 which, I think, was the main spreadsheet application at the time. I'm going back 25 years though so apologies if my memory is not what it used to be!

I believe this is an article you were looking for (written by Joel Spolsky): http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html

The gist is that even though most people only use 20% of the features, everyone's 20% is a different set of features. So by creating a 'lite' version of your software, you actually end up alienating a lot of your users.

What you're talking about is the 80-20 rule: 80% of people only need 20% of the featureset.

It's an incidence of the Pareto Principle, and dates back to 1906.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

No, that's not what he's talking about.

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