« Market Leadership, Thought Leadership and Blog Addiction | Main | The King is Dead, Long Live the King »

November 08, 2004

Quote of the week - Simplicity

Great set of articles from the recent Economist Technology quarterly, starting out with a great quote from Confucius: “Life is simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”
Here are some highlights from these articles:

• The ABCs of complexity in the enterprise: 66% of all IT projects either fail outright or take much longer to install than expected because of their complexity; average firm's computer networks are down for an unplanned 175 hours a year; 15 years ago firms were spending 75% of their IT budget on new hardware and software and 25% on fixing the systems that they already had; now that ratio has been reversed—70-80% of IT spending goes on fixing things rather than buying new systems.... Customers no longer demand “hot” technologies, but instead want “cold” technologies, such as integration software, that help them stitch together and simplify the fancy systems they bought during the boom years.
• A huge gap exists between what consumers want and what vendors would like to sell them.
• And few technologies pass the Mom Test where they are simple enough for mom to use

Simplicity seems to be the new buzzword in the blogsphere as well. With good reason. So what's the answer? Several threads recently talk about simplicity in software and where it’s headed, where it might be coming from and what might happen in the process of trying to get there, alot highlight the promise of Web Services but the jury is far from in.

• Emergic notes Adam Bosworth’s recent post on Software as a Service “Most of the value today is coming from the community, the reputation, the access to information and goods and services, and the media itself. This ineluctable fact coupled with the driving forces of much faster evolution in response to the natural selection of market needs, much cheaper and easier and more simple user interface, and much better ability to know what can be done better for the customer are all combining. Services will be the dominant model.
• Beyond VC highlights the same post and summarizes why it’s the model of the future: “it’s easier to sell, it’s easier to install, cheaper to support, easier to integrate, cheaper to build, “While I am not suggesting that every product will evolve this way, it is clear that simplicity rules. The ASP model is certainly one way of accomplishing simplicity.” Big promises, really worthy of driving forward and motivating an industry, but a tall order nonetheless, especially for existing big vendors.
• Scott Loftness takes note of the same post but poses some questions: “First, the question of revenue ramp. No question that building sustaining recurring revenue streams results in highly valued businesses at the end. But it requires patient investors who are comfortable with the slope of the revenue curve… Second, the target environment has to presume broadband to deliver a decent consumer experiencce. That's increasingly less of an issue -- but has to be thought out… It's also important to note that some companies can do both. Intuit's Quickbooks on the Web comes to mind as a great example of taking packaged software and delivering it in a very high quality way as an ASP…What Sixapart is doing with Movable Type and TypePad is another.”
• And friend, John Ludwig highlights these and a whole number of posts that reinforce simplicity. Of note is Jon Udell’s post that reminds us that simplication and simplicity are not the same thing. In pursuit of simplicity we have to avoid traps like trying to cram everything into one device or service because less is supposedly more.

Holy Grail? Like we’ve said before, Best of both promises may not always be fulfilled but progress toward the goal can drive real evolution. Link to the best of both plays.

Posted by johnza at November 8, 2004 07:58 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.geekfishing.net/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/1293

Comments

Post a comment