AUSTERITY is a word much found on the lips of politicians and economists at the moment; but it is seldom heard from technologists. And although the idea that “less is more” has many adherents in architecture, design and fashion, the technology industry has historically espoused the opposite view. Products should have as many features as possible; and next year’s version should have even more. As prices fall, what starts off as a fancy new feature quickly becomes commonplace””try buying a phone without a camera, or a car without electric windows””prompting companies to add new features in an effort to outdo their rivals. Never mind if nobody uses most of these new features (this article is being typed into word-processing software from 1997, for instance, but it seems to work perfectly well). In an arms race, more is always more.
But now there are signs that technologists are waking up to the benefits of minimalism, thanks to two things: feature fatigue among consumers who simply want things to work, and strong demand from less affluent consumers in the developing world. It is telling that the market value of Apple, the company most closely associated with simple, elegant high-tech products, recently overtook that of Microsoft, the company with the most notorious case of new-featuritis. True, Apple’s products contain lots of features under the hood, but the company has a knack for concealing such complexity using elegant design. Other companies have also prospered by providing easy-to-use products: think of the Nintendo Wii video-games console or the Flip video camera. Gadgets are no longer just for geeks, and if technology is to appeal to a broad audience, simplicity trumps fancy specifications.
Another strand of techno-austerity can be found in software that keeps things simple in order to reduce distractions and ensure that computer-users remain focused and productive….
Some of this article’s conclusions are okay, but anyone who has been familiar with software and the internet over the last fifteen years knows quite well the horrors of [i]feature creep[/i], the prime examples being Netscape in its bid to keep up with Internet Explorer and then Internet Explorer itself. A long standing urban legend on the web is that software like Internet Explorer got to be so complex that when MS tried to fix a bug, it would create five more.
That may be because Microsoft increased the complexity of its browser, and its integration into the operating system, in order to fight allegations of browser monopoly and resist removing it from Windows. That complexity is due to strategy and politics, not the requirements of technology.
[blockquote]perhaps there is a chance that governments—which have also tended to be inveterate believers in the idea that more is more—might also come to appreciate the merits of minimalism.[/blockquote]
And we could call them, “Republicans,” or something.