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Comment by a4isms | Hacker News Reader

They used to say of Microsoft Word, "Nobody uses more than 5% of its features, but every company uses a different 5%."

The saying is apocryphal and unlikely to be accurate, but the shape of the thing its describing applies to almost every piece of enterprise software whether installed on-prem or SaaS.

And as another comment points out, at Enterprise scale you can substitute "team" or "group" for customer. Every team might use a different 5%, and unless you standardize their processes, you have to buy the product that can accomodate all of their needs.

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>"Nobody uses more than 5% of its features, but every company uses a different 5%."

>The saying is apocryphal and unlikely to be accurate

Well its mathematically impossible to be accurate as soon as you have > 20 users.

A better counterexample is that one user could use all features.

But your statement doesn't make sense; there might be millions of features, and trillions of ways to combine them to make 5%.

> Well its mathematically impossible to be accurate as soon as you have > 20 users.

It's probably in the semantics.

Text input and editing is clearly a part of functionality that's probably used by everyone (or at least most users), so it's not possible for "different 5%" to mean what you're alluding to, maybe the phrasing needs work.

In any given 5% there might be 1-4% of overlap with what others are using and the remainder of that is specific to the company.

And the greater the degree of overlap the weaker the implicit argument.

If it's a uniform distribution of discrete features then each feature is equally "important" and worth equal resources and dev time. If 81/100 companies use the exact same 5% of features and the remaining 19 cover the remaining 95%, then all else equal you can probably drop 95% of your features and still do well.

The dynamics of the Enterprise market are such that there are features where having just one customer that will make a buy/no-buy decision based on just one feature will deliver enough incremental ARR to justify the opportunity cost of doing that feature instead of a bunch of others.

Typically you do the most popular features first, but most Enterprise vendors end up working on a long tail of niche features that nevertheless are profitable.

There's a long conversation to be had about how this ends up being a trap where Enterprise software gets bloated and shitty and eventually gets disrupted by a small vendor that does "less," but in a powerful, transformative way that obsoletes the Enterprise "standard," which leads us back to discussing Atlassian :-)

They're a good example of this dynamic, because they have a "constellation" of products to sell. So if they build a niche feature that gets a new customer to buy Jira seats, having "landed" in the account, their salespeople can "expand" by selling OpsGenie and other related products very profitably.

Only if you assume the 5% of features to be a contiguous block each time.

However, if we assume there are, say, 100 features in Word (the real number is likely much higher), the number of combinations is orders of magnitude higher than 20.

False. If you have 100 features, there are nCr(100, 5) combinations of 5% features = 75287520.

If it's no more than 5% of the features, it's actually n-choose-k(100,5) + n-choose-k(100,4) + n-choose-k(100,3) + n-choose-k(100,2) + 100!

    75,287,520
  +  3,921,225 
  +    161,700
  +      4,950
  +        100
  ------------
    79,375,495

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