Heath Brownsworth

Since beginning to work with the cloud, one of the overarching goals that I have personally had is to use the cloud to simplify enterprise software. Not just the installation and delivery, but every aspect. We, the collective we, in the enterprise software industry have managed to build layer of complexity on top of layer of complexity for the last 30 years. The result, products with every conceivable feature, most of which none of us can remember how to use or who requested that we put the specific feature into the product.In their recent article, Customers Don't Want More Features, Donald Reinersten and Stefan Thomke put their finger on the fundamental issue:

Product-development teams seem to believe that adding features creates value for customers and subtracting them destroys it.

While Reinersten and Thomke are not specially speaking about the cloud, or even software for that matter, their advice on taking the time to clearly define the problem that you are trying to solve and then making tough choices about what to hide or omit in the name of providing the simplest most elegant solution to solving your customer's problems should be the guiding principles for all of us in product management and product development. This holds espcialy true for enterprise software. Cloud offers the opportunity to revist our products and simplify and simplify we should. Now is the time.

Heath-