Five reasons featuritis exists

Kathy Sierra has been writing about featuritis long before Web 2.0, so we understand the pain she must feel in observing the renewed life behind this ugly trend.

In a typically entertaining post titled "Ignore the competition," she hits the nail on the virtual head once again: "I'm so tired of seeing so many products with the same features that nobody wants. It's bad enough to let feature requests from users get out of control, but when we start adding features just because our competitors have them, we're all screwed."

Sierra goes on to theorize five reasons that the obsession with features persists, and she even includes a handy graphic called "The Featuritis Curve" that satirically plots the relationship between the number of features and user unhappiness.