Should MSDN & TechNet get more narrow-minded? (the 90/10 rule)
Recent comments by Steve Ballmer are getting a good amount of attention. James Kendrick posts that what Steve is clueing into is the "90/10" rule that most people spend 90% of their time using 10% of a product's functionality. While this makes sense for consumer products like phones, I wonder if it makes sense for reference/support sites like MSDN and TechNet.
On the one hand, we hear frequently that we should just fix search, that everyone uses search for navigation, that we have "too much going on" with our pages... On the other hand, when we engage with customers on building new applications like our new forums or social bookmarking apps, we're presented with laundry lists of all the specialized features it needs to have.
Now, up until recently, I've been a Program Manager and a Product Planner at Microsoft. I understand that any product receives requests for 542 features, and it's our job to figure out which 10 features will have the most bang for the development buck--which ones make up the "golden 10%" that James is discussing. I get that. My point is that I think Microsoft users in particular have been conditioned into a type of schizophrenia: I want it all, but make it simple. If it's too complex, I'll bash you for being over-engineered and for performance / compatibility issues. If it's too simplistic, I'll bash you for being... well... narrow-minded.
Our new forums platform is a good example. You'll see on a forum page like this one (if you're signed in), that we finally landed on 11 different filter options (7 in the dropdown), 6 sorting options, and 4 other controls in the toolbar. That's cut down from the original requests. We'd love to simplify this down to a Zen(Zune?)-like 3 or 4 buttons, but we'd have a revolt.
We also have this nifty new preview feature that includes a link to reply from the preview. It saves a ton of page refreshes, and people love it so much that they're now asking to add features to it. We'd like to stop at just adding "mark as answer" and "quote", but we're definitely getting requests from heavy users to make this page so functional that the actual thread page is no longer needed. Not a very Apple-like approach, and that's coming from our customers, not from a presumed predilection of Microsoft engineers for feature bloat.
I'd love thoughts/comments about whether MSDN and TechNet should strike a different balance on the simplicity factor than consumer products, and why...
