I've heard a lot of carping about products being "bloated" with "too many features" but I have never seen someone (including myself) stop using a tool because it was too powerful. Perhaps this is a personality trait; either you're a vi person or an emacs person (even if you don't actually use one of those most of the time).
> I've heard a lot of carping about products being "bloated" with "too many features" but I have never seen someone (including myself) stop using a tool because it was too powerful
Not because it's "too powerful", no; you'd stop using it because of the fallout. A newer, sleeker alternative comes out with 20% of the features, resulting in a cleaner, faster UX that eats market share (Trello/Jira). Bugs accumulate until people give up. New users open the program, take one look at 3 stacked toolbars of unintelligible options, and go devise workflows that let them avoid opening it again. Structural problems ironically make it hard to add new features so it starts getting rejected. The features are fine, but they're not free.
> A newer, sleeker alternative comes out with 20% of the features
Yes, and everyone tries it and sees it's missing their one rare feature that they use all the time and that's the end of that dalliance. In the words of jwz, "Mozilla is big because your needs are big."
Bugs accumulate until people give up Yes - all those additonal (seldom used) features have costs ... more bugs, harder to use, slower app, more storage & memory.
I submit that these costs are mostly insignificant stacked up next to "the alternative lacks that one niche feature you personally absolutely cannot live without."
They might be insignificant costs to the user who wants that niche feature, but they affect all users. So millions of people are pay costs associated with something used by a tiny niche.
The problem is that everyone is part of one niche or another. Each group, naturally, sees their own needs are the core feature set the software should have and thinks the other stuff is irrelevant junk that can be removed. But the reason this doesn't happen is a lack of broad consensus on which features belong in which categories.
WordPerfect Syndrome. People who have been scarred by the experience of learning a nightmare product are reluctant to move on to more capable tools that are much easier to learn.
