Simple is Valuable

As customers, we all crave simple, easy and quick. But when we're vendors we make what we sell complex, difficult to support, hard to administer and as such capital intensive so we need investors to back us and all of us prefer to lump our developers into one group, QA into another and have support shield both. We create overly complex stuff and we serve it up in silos of expertise. I think we do it to justify our existence, I might be wrong, but it makes us all really important and we like that.

What if we didn't have that urge to be really important, grandiose, and we didn't feel like we have to prove our value through the mass of what we offer and the specialized teams required to deliver it? What if we prided ourselves on how simple our stuff is?

What if what we sold was simple and because it was simple it wasn't hard to support.

What if one of the ways we made it simple was to make sure that it only addressed what people really needed and what if our developers and QA people were completely aligned with the simple philosophy and they knew exactly what the customer wanted because they were domain experts?

What if we took that simple product, built for exactly what people needed, no more, and we actually made it really easy to understand what it does, what it costs and customers could all try it out ad nauseam before they actually purchased it?

What if we made it real simple to purchase and eliminated all of the post purchase administration questions of what was that bill for, where's my credit, why haven't you paid me, etc. etc.?

What if because what we did was so simple that the cost to do it was really reasonable and we didn't need investors? What if we spent all of our time creating something valuable rather than gathering and managing other peoples money?

What if we took all of those silos; sales@domain.com, support@domain.com, admin@domain.com, investors@domain.com, developers@domain.com and qualityassurance@domain.com and we said, let's just have one group email address called support@domain.com and we all belong to it and we all can answer any question that comes through it, and more importantly we can all learn by watching what get's asked and how it get's responded to?

I think if we did that our customers would get their simple, easy and quick craving fulfilled every time they pulled up to our store. I'd bet they come to the store more often and tell all of their friends about it as well.