A PM that worked on Excel in the late 2000s explained it to me like this:
Most people use about 20% of the features in Excel - which should make it easy for competitors to copy, right?
The kicker is that different people/industries tend to use a “different 20%” of the features, making the barrier to really compete very high.
> The kicker is that different people/industries tend to use a “different 20%” of the features, making the barrier to really compete very high.
The thing is that different job functions that are exposed to overlapping user bases in the same industry (and even office) use a different 20%. If it was just per-industry variation, it would be easy for industry-specific competitors to succeed, but the parts of Excel used actively by Andrew, who makes a tool that is also consumed by Bob and Carol are different than those used actively by Bob and Carol (which also differ from each other, and which each have their own users who rely on the tool and the features it relies on, even though they don't actively use the features.)
It was that combined with Microsoft somehow finding a way to make it so the 80% of the features that you didn't use didn't get in the way. Same thing with Word.
