The Heresy of Simplicity

The best businesses, the ones that really change things, are often built for people who aren’t experts. They take the messy, complicated stuff that only a few truly understand and make it so simple that the other 90% of the world can use it without thinking twice.

Building for Experts Is a Thankless Job

It’s a natural instinct, especially if you’re good at something, to want to build for people like you. Engineers want to build for engineers, because they know the jargon and the pain points. But building for experts is often a surprisingly thankless job. They’re a tough crowd. They know what they’re talking about, so they’ll spot every flaw, and they will compare you to every other option out there. And because they could probably build a version of what you’re selling themselves, they’re not always eager to pay top dollar, so margins are razor-thin and loyalty doesn’t last.

You see this pattern well beyond software. Think about skincare. Dermatologists will tell you that most of the fancy stuff is unnecessary and a basic routine is often all you need. Yet the shelves are overflowing with elixirs and multi-step regimens promising miracles. Most people aren’t biochemists, and what they buy is hope, or a moment of self-care, packaged in a nice bottle. People who do understand the science are tempted to be condescending and to dismiss these customers as uninformed. But that’s a dangerous path, and it’s the “technology-first” mindset at work. The commercial world runs on what users actually perceive and need, whatever an engineer thinks they should want or understand. Believing users are simply “stupid” for not grasping the technical details is a fast track to building something nobody cares about.

Or consider consumer electronics. We all know that person, the audiophile or the PC builder, who can list a dozen reasons why the popular mainstream product is technically inferior. They’ve done the research and they understand the specs. But most people don’t buy a speaker because of its frequency response curve. They buy it because it looks good, it’s easy to use, and it makes their music sound a bit better. They might not even know exactly what they want, beyond a vague desire for something nice. If you only market to the spec-obsessed, you’re talking to a very tiny fraction of the potential audience, also perhaps the most picky ones.

Woz’s Boards, Jobs’s All-in-One

The early days of Apple show this tension well. Steve Wozniak, an engineering wizard, created Apple I boards that were marvels of ingenuity, elegant in a way only fellow engineers could really appreciate. His designs let you follow the logic all the way down to how the components interacted. This thrilled the Homebrew Computer Club, enthusiasts who loved to solder and tinker until they understood every circuit. For them, a computer was an open invitation. They wanted modularity: the ability to swap components, experiment with expansion cards, and connect their own peripherals to the system bus. Wozniak’s bare-bones designs, with their exposed parts, fed that hunger for control and endless modification. Users bought the board, sourced their own parts, and the real joy was in building their system.

Jobs saw computers reaching beyond the hobbyist niche, to people who didn’t know their way around a soldering iron or hexadecimal code. When a local computer store, the Byte Shop, wanted the Apple I fully assembled rather than as a kit, Jobs took the order, even though selling assembled boards was almost heretical to the Homebrew crowd. He even pictured a complete, all-in-one machine: take it out of the box, plug it in, and use it. That was a leap. The Homebrew enthusiasts were unimpressed. They didn’t see why they should pay for assembly they could do themselves, and they preferred open, modifiable systems where they could see the “guts.” Wozniak’s genius won over that group, but Jobs pushed for a product that would appeal to a much broader audience, people who didn’t know or care what a microprocessor looked like, let alone how to interface with its address lines. Jobs understood that most people didn’t want to build computers. They wanted to use them. Apple’s eventual success, and its path to being everywhere, came from Woz’s technical brilliance and also from Jobs’ relentless drive to hide that complexity and make the powerful feel effortless for everyone else.

Jony Ive and the Aesthetics of Simplicity

This brings us to what simplicity actually means, and making things look clean is only part of it. Jony Ive, the former Head of Design at Apple, cautioned that just chasing minimalism can lead to “desiccated, soulless” products. For Ive, real simplicity had to have utility: “If something does not have utility, it’s just ugly.” He also talked about how hard true simplicity is. The hard part, Ive said, is first “identifying what’s truly important.” And then, even harder, “compressing the complex.” That takes understanding the core purpose of something well enough to find the most direct path to it.

If you’re building something, it’s tempting to get caught up in the cleverness of your solution and the elegance of your code. We all do it. But the market rewards things that solve real problems for real people, easily, and raw technical prowess on its own rarely gets you there. If your product requires a manual the size of a phone book, most people will give up. They want a tool that makes their life a little bit better, right now.

So, the next time you see a product that seems “too simple” or “not advanced enough,” pause for a moment. Its makers may have done the hard part already: they worked out what mattered and hid the rest. Some of the biggest opportunities lie in taking the power that was once locked away with the experts and giving it to everyone, and that is often great business as well as good design.