sahn @ : Impact
Lots of software companies in their recruiting efforts talk about the "impact" that their software has in terms of the number of users. For example, they mighty say that your software will impact the 20 million people who use the software daily. Programmers tend to be more interested in working on software with a couple million users than software with a couple hundred users. And even among other people, making an impact is important. But after hearing about impact from a lot of software companies, I think impact (especially solely in terms of number of users) is the wrong measure. I think what's more important than impact is contribution.

