Is the rifle better than the shotgun

Rifle is the single shot should work approach, shot gun is the spraying pellets approach. FogBugz and Vault are examples of the rifle approach. Gmail was the rifle approach but the rest of the stuff from Google such as froogle, picasa, gtalk, ... seem to follow the shotgun approach. Now we have Zoho's product suite .. 60 products in 9 years. Is this a pure shot gun play?

I started working on this post a few weeks back and moved away from it. Recently I came across Dead2.0 and this scathing report on Zoho. I am by creation not that scathing or cynical but I sure did enjoy the write up :-)

Maybe this post is just because my intuition is refusing to deal with facts but something about building and releasing 60 products (yes they call them products not features and no apparently there were no acquisitions) over just 9 years seems a little too much to me. Craig talks more sense and reason in his latest post here.

I agree the cost of making mistakes is getting lower but that does not mean we should stop being intentional with our time and effort.