I see I can count on you to be a contributor to my inevitable side hustle slash passion project justhotelbathroomreviews dot com. Gold star if you also report back on the (nearly always inadequate) lighting for the mirror and the (frequently over-softened) water hardness

If we're going to make people prepare and file taxes, it should be free and easy. IRS Direct File does this, with sky-high customer satisfaction numbers.

How did The Rising not show up in this episode? Please say it's because it's getting its own ep!

I think about this story every time someone tells me they think our federal government is too big and bloated.

There was, it turned out, almost nothing that was used by almost nobody. In fact when they tried to cut back on some legal industry specific features, they got enormous blowback and had to backtrack. Word was on everyone's desktops, so it had to be many things to many people — a price of ubiquity.

Sure enough, when they dug into how people used Word, they found that the vast majority of users only used about 20% of Word's features.

But **everyone used a different 20%.**

The big knock on Office, and especially Word, was that it was too bloated. Too many features, such a huge install footprint, so wasteful. If you're old enough you remember.

The "bloated" din got so loud that the team conducted a big customer research study to ask the question: what should we cut?

At the time (for reasons not pertinent to this story), MS Office was ubiquitous. Its market share was basically 100%. But being on everyone's desktop didn't mean popular sentiment was also sky high. It was the tool that almost everyone had and used, like it or not. Some people loved to hate it.

What happens when you force mission-driven, impact-craving public servants out of their job, their career?

I have no idea. I don’t think they all pack it in and go work for Fortune 500s. Somebody who could harness their energy and experience would reap big benefits.