“Apple’s Secret Weapon: Consumer Education”
By keeping a laser focus on key features and introducing them one at a time over a period of years, Apple taught and evangelized everything the consumer needed to know to understand the iPad from day one. Without that foundation, it’s not likely the product would have been nearly the success it has been.
That’s a great argument in favor of keeping your first release light on features. What matters is how early adopters experience your product; once you’ve got something that resembles mass adoption, it’s okay to introduce more functional complexity, because your existing users will have an easier learning curve and they will help new users. It’s that initial simplicity that Windows never really had. (Well, Windows 1.0 had simplicity; it just didn’t have users, or uses.)
You could even push the reasoning as far as saying that keeping third-party developers away from the iPhone for a year was the best thing Apple ever did.
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