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Comment by CSMastermind | Hacker News Reader

This is solved in food products by differentiation. Someone likes the no pulp orange juice so they buy that and someone else likes the stuff with pulp in it so they buy that.

Why not do the same thing with software?

Release 10 different flavors of Microsoft Word and let people choose the one they want.

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This sounds like a really bad idea. With orange juice it takes less than 30 seconds to differentiate the versions. If this was done with something like Microsoft Word you would probably have to spend the better part of a day teasing out exactly which features you needed or wanted. I think a semi relevant modern example would be how the release of hitman 3 worked out. They had to make a flow chart of how to buy the right copy of the game with the features you wanted.

https://i.redd.it/cfnqsnldc1d81.png

> They had to make a flow chart of how to buy the right copy of the game with the features you wanted

"They" makes it sound like IO Interactive (developers and publisher of Hitman) made that flow chart for people to use, but in reality it's community made by someone from Reddit.

And to be honest, it doesn't seem that complicated, seems like a joke flow chart to make it more complicated than what it is. These editions seems to exists (for the record, I have neither and first time I hear about them):

- Trilogy Premium Add-ons Bundle

- Trilogy Edition

- Standard Edition

- Deluxe Edition

- A DLC

Trilogy obviously is about the full series (1 to 3), and Deluxe edition contains "Deluxe Pack". Which one you want? Ok, want the DLC too? Ok.

It's really not that complicated.

That does not work.

People only use 10% of word, but this does not mean that you can partition all users in batch of "10% of features".

If you want to satisfy everyone, you have to make every possible combination of "10% of word features". Which is impossible.

So it's much easier to just combine all features in one product and try to give the user a good interface to find easily the feature they are looking for.

> If you want to satisfy everyone, you have to make every possible combination of "10% of word features". Which is impossible.

I remember Caddy used to have a "kitchen sink" packager or something like that available via their website, where you could pick and chose what features you'd want included.

Playing with the idea (I'm not saying it's a good idea or that I want it), Microsoft could offer something similar, where you tick boxes for what use-cases you want it to fit, and bundle it all together for you with a price per use-case.

I'd absolutely hate it, as I never know what I need in the future, but maybe for some people it'd make sense.

It's been almost 20 years since I compiled linux, but it was kind of like that. You would choose the features you needed and ignore the rest. Other compiled applications generally have options you can pass to make to enable certain features. Python readline comes to mind.

It would be interesting if we had a similar system for GUI applications. The interface would need to be generated to only show features that are included

Because the cost of production does not scale in a reasonable manner, nor would it be good for users. What happens when you need feature X that is only available in 6th edition, or need to open a document prepared in the 8th edition by someone else?

That's called a competing product :)

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