Serving sizes have been going up for a long time in the food industry, especially in America. More is better, right? More is better value. Sometimes at restaurants when the meal is set down in front of me, I’m thinking it’s a serving for a small family of four, not a single person. More. More. More. Until more makes you sick. 

Software is the same thing. More. More. More. When we shop for software, we often compare products based on the number of features. I call this “buying software by the pound.” It is pervasive and I’m not going to talk many people out of this approach with this article. I’m going to keep writing anyway because buying software by the pound often results in terrible outcomes. Software’s success or failure in a print company rarely is determined by missing features. I know this sounds crazy because this is the reason most print business owners give when they go back out to shop for an alternative software solution.

Software fails to deliver the ROI it was bought to deliver because the business and the software never entered a committed relationship. There are exceptions to this, but they are extremely rare. If a business really commits to a committed relationship with the software, there is a very slim chance of it not delivering on the ROI. Software fails because of lack of commitment, not because of a lack of features.