I wonder if my friend Alec just knew what was on my mind today. Let me surround this with a little context. Here's a sign that hangs in my home office:



One word, but oh so meaningful. I've written about simplifying life many times. More than I can recall, but here, here, here and here for starters. Then again, another blogger I read regularly, Euan Semple posted this to Twitter earlier today - Finished my GTD weekly review and feeling rather smug. GTD is yet another productivity tool and Euan's simple message on Twitter reminded me to do my own update, and to recognize again, how much value using David Allen's GTD approach has brough in simplifying how I tackle work. So my mind has been on simple and elegant solutions to getting through the day.

Today Alec wrote:

People buy features

Would you buy fewer features if given the option? Imagine, for example, being given the choice of a brand new vehicle with a five channel stereo, GPS navigation system, and luxury heated seats, or a bare bones vehicle. Now imagine, all other things being equal, that they cost the same… Who wouldn’t go for the tricked out vehicle?

That’s Joel Spolsky’s contention in Simplicity.  It’s also Donald Norman’s view when he says that Simplicity is highly overrated.

I put features in the context of how they simplify my life. Some people think I'm a gadget junkie, and I may well be, but I use those gadgets to simplify life and counter the problem of continuous partial attention I mentioned earlier today in Looking to the future in Unified Communications. I just didn't use simplicity as a word to describe it.

Features, and solution providers, like iotum, GrandCentral, Twitter, Unyte, Talkster, SightSpeed and the like (I've talked abuot these folks a lot lately) simplify my life by broadening my communications capability. Flickr and blip tv simplify sharing information - pictures and video. I carried and mobile phone and a Palm PDA for years. Those came together and were simplified when I bought a Treo 700W a year ago. Nokia, with the N-series phones, present another solution at simplifying the complexity of daily life.

I've been thinking about that a bit today while working on a book chapter. Geeks don't embrace gadgets for gadgetry alone in most cases. There's an old adage about doing more with less, but that's a blatant lie. You can only do less with less. We embrace more because more let's us do more, and it's not a linear progression. The feature that simplifies three or four things I need to do is far more valuable than a feature than simplifies only one thing.

That's what unified communications is really about. It's about simplification. The more solution providers simplify, the better they integrate, and the more power they give to users, the more successful they'll be.

When I started writing this, it was destined for my personal blog, but I think it's worth posting on the Realtime Unified Communications site too. Because we need to simplify everywhere. Simplicity and elegance will win in the competitive marketplace every time.


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