Deep vs. Broad
Coding is all about the people.
It's about the people that code and the users they code for. You users are your audience. As with concerts, putting on a good show will make people happy; it will make them come back for more.
But to define "a good show," let's go into the restaurant business. Say you open a restaurant that serves steak and sausages. The dishes are pretty good, so you build a decent following. The next step is your restaurant's growth is to bring in more people! The question is: how do you go about that?
You can add another four types of steak, and five different sausage dishes. That will be the wrong thing to do. Your clientele has already been set. They are meat eaters. Bringing in more types of meat will not bring you more clients. Not considerably more and not directly, anyway.
What it will do is make people that are happy with your restaurant slightly happier. That means making deeper connections, but you want more clients!
The right move is to add an equally good vegetarian dish, or maybe two. This way, you're getting into a new group of people. People that previously had no interest in coming to your meat-eater-exclusive restaurant. You are making for a broader reach to a more diversified group.
Now, let's bring this to the realm of the internet.
Evernote have a service which allows you to synchronize text or voice memos, images, videos, and what-not over desktops and smartphones. Their product's features are few, and simple at that. But that is a good thing. They do not do everything, but the little they to, they does great!
A few weeks ago, I got into a chat with Deadprogrammer about how he hates it that Evernote cannot rotate images. He thinks it's a simple feature and a must-have. I think he can just turn his iPhone sideways.
A few days ago, he took his little grudge really public, bashing the devs over at Evernote for focusing on a version of their product that will work on the Palm Pre, rather than working hard to get the image rotate feature working on the already popular iPhone version of Evernote.
The thing is, Evernote gets money from people's subscriptions. Adding a new feature, like image rotate, would be going deeper. It would make some of their clients happier. What they want and need right now is to get more clients, more people to use their software. They need to go broader! And that is exactly what they are trying to do.
Their approach is working, for now, but they will need to deepen the connection with their users soon, though. And they will, when their audience is big enough.
Discussion
Hi
I get your point but I just wanted to add that it is really annoying and rather odd that you can't rotate pictures in Evernote. Plus the answer is not "rotate your iPhone" because when you do that, the iPhone detects the moveement and rotates the picture too... so it is still the wrong way round!
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