Google co-founder Sergey Brin says that success will come from simplicity. Nicholas Carr calls simplicity the new spaghetti and tries to consolidate Google's many, many products into 5 categories (web presence, web office, content sharing, ad platform and search platform) - because 5 is the magic number; Eric Schmidt says that's as many as most people can remember.
As Brin puts it, "if we continue to develop so many new individual products that are all in their assorted silos, you will have to essentially search for our products before you can even use them... I would rather have a smaller set of products that have a shared set of features."
This reminded me of my recent visit to 1&1's website. There are *lots* of features on this chart; I counted to 50 before losing track. That ain't simplicity! iPowerweb has a similarly long list, as does LunarPages. (LunarPages has a great blog, by the way. I found it about it from Ben Welch-Bolen at ResellerGuide.)
Yes, all of these companies are very successful - but isn't Google? If Google thinks it's important to build easier to understand products with more tightly integrated features, might they be on to something?
For instance, many hosting companies have photo albums that don't integrate with blogs, shopping carts that don't have similar-looking templates to site builders, web stats software that isn't set up to track results from SEO and email marketing tools... As an end user, I'd rather have a seamless feature set than another 1000 GB of bandwidth I'll never use. Wouldn't you?
Update: Jon Udell from InfoWorld talks about Clayton Christensen-style disruption in his latest blog post. Google's office apps are collaboratively adept and functionally lame, he says. And Microsoft's apps are adept and lame in the opposite ways. He cites a reader's example of Google Docs adoption within her company and among her customers:
"We started using them around the office for convenience and they've taken off. We found the version control, collaboration and invite system outweighed the limited feature set. For the most part, they have the very basic functionality covered."
In other words, convenience outweighs a large feature set. If Google Docs can take on Word and Excel, might the also-simple Google Pages be a contender against your hosting plan?
I agree that it is all too confusing to present a list of open source apps that come pre-installed on Fantastico or whatever one-click installers, or every possible features, especially on a shared hosting plan. However it can also be annoying when the provider does not even list some basic specification (like shopping for a VPS but amount of RAM is not specified). If I need to chat with a sales person when I shop, I won't do it online :)
Then again I think shared hosting providers should definitely make their plans simpler. Consumers today won't get too excited when they see a big list of items with FREE* next to them. There are also way too many parameters for them to think about (how many domains, how many emails, how many databases, how many FTP accounts, etc). They just need to know how much space they've got, and a statement declaring "do whatever you want with them".
Scott - I spent some time tinkering with Google Apps for Domains earlier. I've built a few simple websites for friends on GoDaddy's $3/month accounts, and I think those could easily be recreated with the Google Pages site builder. In fact, the average consumer/small business would have an easier time managing a Google Apps site. There's no mention of bandwidth/disk space anywhere, and no feature list at all. And yet it works. So I think that's the level of simplicity low end shared hosting providers should aim for.
Developers are a totally different story. They do need detailed technical specs - and they might benefit from more community features. For instance, I like http://www.textsnippets.com/ from Joyent and Amazon's developer solutions catalog. A co-branded version of a code search tool like Krugle.com would be cool too.