I just read “The Brash Boys at 37 Signals Will Tell Yo: Keep it Simple Stupid” in Wired Magazine, and it got me all fired up to write a response, because I thought it developed an incomplete picture.

37 signals leads the charge for one of Web 2.0’s core tenants, simplicity. Their rapid/rabid pursuit of a minimalist products has found a niche in the market, and I respect them for being uncompromising in their approach.

If a user decides that a simple robust feature set is not what they want, then they can go use something else. You cannot build everything for everyone, and sometimes this results in you losing users. You have to do this to protect your core user base, the people that are there for the simplicity, the ones that might not be using this type of software at all if it wasn’t for the simple approach. Obviously, if you start to lose a much more significant number of users, then you have to think about growing with your user base.

With Angelsoft, I’ve (or rather the dev team) experienced many of these tensions. There is no such thing as a “standard” Angel group (our core focus right now), so every single group has a wide variety of requests, and building a standard application that works for all of these un-standardized groups becomes really difficult. We spend a lot of time deciding (arguing) which features to leave in, and which features to throw out. At some point in time each one of our clients has asked for every single feature you can imagine, some of which we couldn’t even see how the feature would be useful. In the end, we have to decide what Angelsoft wants to protect, and then we continually have to resell the user on our vision, so they can be happy moving on without that feature (or knowing we’re addressing that issue in another way).

37 signals really brought this concept to the forefront for me. They have drawn a line in the sand, and said over this line we do not cross. Does that work for me? No, not up until recently. I’ve never paid for any of their products, and frankly I’ve never stuck to using any of their products for any extended amount of time. This is probably for a lack of need on my part, and not for any issues with their design and business methodology. I’m definitely considering using highrise because of my frustrations with salesforce.com. But as I go into evaluating high-rise, I no high-rise doesn’t track opportunities or sales pipelines. I know it’s not a CRM, and I don’t have to fear that it will grow (bloat) into one. There are products, however slowly, filling the middle ground between high-rise in salesforce.com (see ).

My point is, they don’t have to be assholes about it, but they have a perfectly good reason to do what they’re doing. They found a market, they are sticking to it, they didn’t take outside funding, so now they don’t have to buckle to VC pressure to “go big”. Most importantly, regardless of what you think of simplicity, complexity is NOT the answer.

In the wired article a Microsoft consultant says “complexity is a necessary byproduct of the modern age.” What?!?!?! complexity is a byproduct of bad design, and bad software companies!! Look at companies like Google and Apple. They’ve made entire growing businesses of simple software. Even worse, Microsoft goes on to explain that customers actually want and use the extra features. I’m a power user, and I don’t use 1/100th of the features in word and excel?! Who are these people using all these features? Last time I worked in a big company, the people could barely use excel, much less their extremely expensive document managment platforms, and reporting packages. That’s exactly why I switched to Google docs, and that’s why Google docs will start taking more market share as soon as the masses get comfortable with online web apps in general. I don’t need any of those extra features, and the extra online accessibility definitely provides added value.

I’ll take my theory is a step further. I think most software fails because of complexity. Not that successful companies can’t be built on “failed” software. I have been using (aka struggling) salesforce.com for over four years, and I am just now figuring out mildly useful ways of using the application. This experience has led me to discover that salesforce.com is completely unusable for the day-to-day use of a salesperson (I’ll have another post on this soon). They are a successful company because their sales team sells well to managers. Managers want a dashboard that tracks their sales pipeline, in salesforce can deliver that, if the client strictly enforces the use of salesforce across the entire company. In the end, a much simpler product could provide the same results, by providing a better experience to the salesperson, resulting in their eager participation, and more accurate data reporting.

I think this problem affects most software in the enterprise software space, and smaller companies with simpler products will start carving out market share from them. The enterprise world has been completely delusional thinking that their employees are using and getting benefit from their overly complicated, bloated, massively expensive “IT projects” that took years to put in place.

Time to start innovating!