A quick story about big “bloated” systems that people — and especially people who know just enough to sound smart and be dangerous — love to hate. When I was at Microsoft a million years ago, I had a friend on the MS Word team who told me this one. (I got the details second-hand; MSFT friends, please correct me.)

At the time (for reasons not pertinent to this story), MS Office was ubiquitous. Its market share was basically 100%. But being on everyone’s desktop didn’t mean popular sentiment was also sky high. It was the tool that almost everyone had and used, like it or not. Some people loved to hate it.

The big knock on Office, and especially Word, was that it was too bloated. Too many features, such a huge install footprint, so wasteful. If you’re old enough you remember.

The “bloated” din got so loud that the team conducted a big customer research study to ask the question: what should we cut?

Sure enough, when they dug into how people used Word, they found that the vast majority of users only used about 20% of Word’s features.

But everyone used a different 20%.

There was, it turned out, almost nothing that was used by almost nobody. In fact, when they tried to cut back on some legal industry specific features, they got enormous blowback and had to backtrack. Word was on everyone’s desktops, so it had to be many things to many people — a price of ubiquity.

I think about this story every time someone tells me they think our federal government is too big and bloated.