James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, has written a short article in The New Yorker on the feature paradox.
“The fact that buyers want bells and whistles but users want something clear and simple creates a peculiar problem for companies. A product that doesn’t have enough features may fail to catch our eye in the store. But a product with too many features is likely to annoy consumers and generate bad word of mouth, as BMW’s original iDrive system did. [...]
The strange truth about feature creep is that even when you give consumers what they want they can still end up hating you for it.”