Simplicity And Laser Focus Will Win Every Time

In response to Mike's very thoughtful comment: I don't agree that the fewer the features, the less your differentation. Differentiation is not established on the basis of broad feature sets, it is established on the basis of one or two really great features. Great software products need something they can hang their hat on. Whenever I hear a pitch or a presentation that tells me about 50 really cool features, I always ask, what's the one killer feature that people will remember you for?

There are a zillion tools that compete with blogger, but blogger's differentiation was that they got one basic feature right (creating and publishing a blog), rather than a thousand little features right. There are lots of tools that are more feature-rich than blogger, but blogger still wins because of its sheer simplicity. I argue that simplicity and laser focus will always win out over diversity and breadth of features. That is why a startup can still take on and beat a big company in a race where the startup seems unlikley to win.