Choking on features.(competitive market)

Adding new features to create temporary differentiation in competitive markets appears to be standard today, as witnessed by the massive number of features on the latest mobile phones. Adding extra features is supported by many common market research techniques, the opinions of lead users, the economics of many product categories, and perhaps most importantly by short-term sales. But this feature bloat or race carries a high cost in terms of reduced usability and consequent customer dissatisfaction.

Market research tools, such as conjoint analysis, tend to support the addition of more features to most products; so do studies asking about preferences between models and …