David Pogue: Simplicity Sells
Some TED Talks are truly ahead of their time. New York Times columnist David Pogue’s “Simplicity Sells” was recorded back in 2006, and his description of a world in which technology is coming on too fast for people to make sense of is perhaps more accurate today than it was then. Amid a few entertaining song parodies on piano that tear into the tech world’s top names, Pogue discusses how developers can give consumers what they want in an age where average users are less tech-savvy, but far larger in number, than back in the DOS era, and complexity just keeps getting layered on.
It’s fascinating to see how far some of the technologies Pogue was demonstrating have come even in the span of a decade, but the advice he gives is just as compelling. Being able to determine what users really need, rather than what a business decides they need, is critical for developers – and partners, too.
When looking at how a given SaaS solution fills a specific customer need, or what features, add-ons and support consumers are looking for and how partner programs facilitate their needs, aiming for simplicity goes a long way in a channel where projects, deployments and multi-player business relationships can seem anything but simple.