I think Joel makes great points in this article about horizontal software. If your product has wide uses, then how do you market it? It will seem generic, and people will ultimately have to adapt it to what they want to do. This is a challenge I've had with Edgy, my minimalistic diagram app for Android, is that experts will see it as an over simplification of a very powerful tool, and general users will not see the potential of just a little bit of that power.
It is also the main point that I am wondering about. It appears that trello especially resonates with software developers and iirc this is also why it was built in the beginning.
Why not embrace that fact and go with it to make it a great tool for software developers?
w/r/t horizontal -- I thought what Mr. Spolsky described was actually vertical adoption: where you and your putative organization use Trello throughout, from the execs to the trench programmers to the marketers to some segment of the public. isn't that vertical?
horizontal use, on the other hand, would be something like FogBugz: pitched to one or two organizational segments in the company silo and developed in a way that takes advantage of the knowledge gained by an in-depth understanding of those few segments.
maybe I just have my axes wrong; i'm not pedantic about it but that's what I always thought.
Usually the terms vertical and horizontal are used to refer to use among different industries, not describing use within a single company. Think of different industries (healthcare, banking, etc.) each as a silo filled with many different companies.
A vertical product would target just one silo. It doesn't matter that not everyone at each company in that silo would use the product, what is important is that the product is only meant to be used by companies in that silo. An example would be software to x-rays. This would be used by some people at the companies in the healthcare silo, but would be of no use to anyone in the banking silo. The product would be tailored to exactly the task that needs to be completed.
A horizontal product would target many or all of the silos. The product would have no specific focus, but would be intended to be generally useful. An example of this would be Excel. Almost all companies in every silo would have someone who uses Excel. They may also use it for vastly different purposes requiring the software to be somewhat generic and the end user to figure out how to use the software to complete the task at hand.
No, this is horizontal. At, say, an oil company, everyone from the engineers to HR the CEO uses Excel. Only the engineers make use of, say, geological analysis tools, with the occasional report going to executive management.
