Another feature war one could engage in is one of fitness. Typical requirements processes and market segmention lead to average products that don’t fit anyone particularly well, because it tries to fit everyone. Average products smudge meaning. The closer you get to the real meaning that users attribute to the labels in your UI, the higher the fitness. If the fitness is too far away from a particular user’s meaning, they will compensate. But, it’s costly to compensate.

The recession is another reason to compete on fitness. It will improve your value proposition by eliminating the costs of compensation. A recession is also a good place to do mass customization, so a feature can have high fitness for different groups of users, even some new users you’ve yet to reach in adjacent markets.

Head to head competition on features, because there is nothing new under the sun is nuts. Admittedly, the subject domain your application automates probably doesn’t change all that fast. There might be a paradigm that you haven’t encoded. But, without a business reason or change in the subject domain, competing on features is a very short-term win.