I just read this via a link at Tom Grant's Heretech blog (which I think is rapidly becoming The Leading Repository of Information about the Software industry Which Will Be Obsolete in Two Weeks) which brought back the good old days of VisiCalc, WordStar,  and 123. This is from Jeff Lash's How To Be A Good Product Manager

+++ If you want to be a bad product manager, release all of your features at once. If you have some cool functionality, why would you wait to show it to the world? You need to get as much out as you can right away — if users don’t see everything that you have to offer the first time they use the product, there’s a chance you might lose them. Sure, there may be some features that they don’t care about, but customers will gladly sift through extra functionality to find the few pieces which might be really worthwhile. +++

The rest of the blog continues to go on about sandbagging features, roadmaps, how product management is a marathon, etc. etc. By the time I'd read to the end, I was fighting the desire to dig up my archived copy of WordStar 3.3 and Ctrl-T and Ctrl-Q-Y a bit. Or head over to eBay and maybe bid on a used Madonna bustier.

I can't tell you how completely irrelevant this feels for a SaaS environment. For companies still shoving bits onto CDs or stuffing big wads of code onto client's servers, yeah, I guess, well, OK. There are some markets out there where the old release cycle still makes knees go aquiver and customers weep with joy that the Akimbo Shaped Table widget has finally been integrated into the Report Tabs.

But as more and more SaaS companies move into a continuous product release cycle and begin to implement development feedback loops via their communities, the above just doesn't mean much anymore.

In our 2009 SaaS Report, the numbers for How Often Do You Release a Major Upgrade to your SaaS System came in at 28% Three times a year and 24% No set release schedule; as developed. At Softletter, we're pretty sure No set release schedule is going to continue to pick up steam in the 2010 report; the fast evolution of SaaS products drives this and the zeitgeist of the environment favors this model.

Which means sandbagging features, product roadmaps, and marathons aren't of much relevance to SaaS companies, at least not as they've been traditionally defined.

And wasn't the heyday of the marathon the 80s?