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0 pointsbryanlarsen6mo ago0 comments

There's a good report/study about the complexity of Microsoft Word floating around somewhere.

It was something like:

- almost everybody only uses about 20% of the features of Word

- everybody's 20% is different, but

- ~80% of the 20% is common to most users.

- on the other hand, the remaining 20% of the 20% is widely distributed and covers basically all of the product.

So if you made a version of Word with 16% of its feature set you would almost make everybody happy. But really, nobody would be happy. There's no small feature set that makes most people happy.

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uticus6mo ago

Yeah but MS Word is also designed with the guidance of an army of accountants and corporate shareholders. Your study plays into that, but there's a much bigger picture when you talk about analyzing how any product came to be that has MS as a prefix.

ashtakeaway6mo ago

Kind of like how the author likely knows about the report and wanted to make a blog post about it without saying anything about or citing the report itself. IT seems like it but 80/20 can be found in lots of places, just like 60/40 can.

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uticus6mo ago

ashtakeaway6mo ago

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