Everyone knows that they only use 10% of what's in Office. But everyone uses a different 10%, and all together they use it all. Yes, it's horribly bloated. Yes, it cointributes to security problems and ever-increasing hardware requirements.

But if you have 100 users, and each of them uses the same 99%, and each one has a unique requirement for another 1%, you end up with just over half the codebase dedicated to %1 slices of your market.

Don't we all bitch every time we see a website "best viewed in Internet Explorer"? Don't we always say, "Don't they know they're excluding 2/5/10/20% (pick your favorite study) of their potential market?" Why is it when companies choose to focus on 90% of their market they're idiots. But when Gnome's developers focus on 90% of the market they'd like to have they're being sensible?

Now if they were to say they're working on the 90% first, as someone suggested above they should say, I'd agree. But if they really do plan to ignore the 10%-ers I think it's a tactical mistake.