* - this app looks and feels like “almost complete spreadsheet” yet it provides much less than 1% features of even a basic spreadsheet.
I'm not saying including the other 20% of functionality isn't a good thing to do, but when you're creating a new product or open source project, you can get by (and thrive) building only the 20% of functionality that's used 80% of the time.
Why? Because 1% of functionality is still better than 0% (never shipping).
You're not Microsoft. You don't have to keep your dominance in the spreadsheet software market like Microsoft has to.
It doesn't actually work well. It doesn't do basic stuff, which makes it entirely unusable. Like you can't move up/down/left/right using the arrow keys. You can't save it. It crashes if you make basic mistakes.
The 80% of perceived functionality is that it looks like a spreadsheet app and actually does some basic calculations.
It actually does about 5% of what you'd expect even the most basic of spreadsheets to do. And all the polish of even the most basic functionality is missing, which is what takes most of the time.
Which is why you should always avoid putting a pretty looking but barely functional mockup in front of the pointy hairs. They then think it's almost done.
But 30 lines of code, what do you expect? Now imagine jQuery type library with a community of developers and you get... Google Docs :-p
This is exactly the insidious myth that the GP is pointing out.
Yes, 80% of the "perceived" functionality might be 1% of the work. But the remaining 20% is a long tail of utterly essential features that are completely fragmented between users. Each user only cares about 80.1% of features, but without the extra 0.1% your spreadsheet is useless.
One user will care that it doesn't print. Another will care that it can't do a sum over columns. Another will care that it doesn't have charts. Another will care that you can't make a bold heading. Another will want statistics functions. Basically your "80% of functionality" has zero value until you do years of work to implement all those 0.1% features.
This myth leads countless people to implement what they think is MVP and then be mystified that their insanely great work still has zero value to anybody they actually show it too.
The incredibly difficult 20% is what people pay for. It's what the businesses that shell out billions of dollars a year pay for. And it's what a successful product in the space needs to tackle
You're talking about "feature minimalism is a good design philosophy".
The other dudes are talking about "bridging the gap between a sweet demo and a final product is a tremendous assload of work".
Also, I don't think that "feature minimalism is a good design philosophy" is always true, even though it may guide you well in most cases.
The perception of being a "almost complete spreadsheet" might be due to the UI looking similar to older versions of Excel, leading people to assume stuff is there that doesn't.