[whpalmer4]

Companies build what they think most customers want, within the constraints of development budget (time, money, and personnel) and what they think they can successfully deliver. Trying to build the perfect product that satisfies everyone from the first release is a fool's errand. It takes too long, allowing the competition to steal all of the customers (who generally need something now), and it prevents you from learning anything from the customers (because you don't have any). If you try to build something too ambitious, you are likely to end up with a product that isn't useful for anyone.

OmniPlan 2 does support multiple users editing and updating the project. The project manager can even monitor the changes and individually areject them as necessary. There's also work underway to integrate it with OmniFocus to dole out the tasks from the overall project to the individuals responsible, with completion data automatically returned to the project manager via OmniPlan. It isn't in the product yet, but I've had a chance to play with parts of it, and it will be a very useful arrow in the quiver, even for solo practitioners.

No, OmniFocus was not built as workgroup software, and as the bulk of the customers do not need to use it that way, it would have made little sense to not ship until such features were ready. More than 100,000 copies sold tells me they were right not to wait. How many sales would have been lost to the competition if they had waited until they had a full groupware implementation to sell? The incremental approach also allows the project to fund its own development, which cuts the financial risk considerably. Finally, everything a solo practitioner needs is likely to be needed in a multiple-user product, so you can start helping much of your customer base much sooner while you are trying to figure out the right approach to building the multiple-user product that will convince the world that yours is the one to buy.

Frankly, if building the better mousetrap was so easy a route to guaranteed commercial success, someone would have done it by now!