Swiss Knife v/s Paring Knife

Product Features v/s Requirement

When we envision a product to suffice a need in the market place, what is the threshold, the limit beyond which if we tread we miss the point .

Most of our IT products are "packed" with features or Functions which the customer never uses/wants.

We assume that he would need it but he never does.

Take the case of any word package, most of the times we hardly use 20% of the features of the package, or for that matter our CPU utilization is hardly 25 to 30% at the max.

So are we making our products overtly complex?, unusable feature packed? and thereby increasing the cost of ownership?

As to include all such "unwanted" features, we would have cost overrun to the project, time delays and increased cost on account of a longer development time.

So are we selling a Swiss Knife ( multi utility knife) when the customer needs/wants only a "paring" knife.

Point to Ponder, Mr Dump.