Simple is Hard
"Sell your home in minutes."
Easy to say, nearly impossible to achieve. Delivering simplicity meant deeply understanding every nuance of real estate: pricing dynamics, operations, and meaningful risk models. The simpler it appeared to customers, the more profoundly we had to understand the problem.
At Meter, we made a similar promise: hand us your commercial space, we'll handle your network. One price, zero complexity. Delivering on that promise required mastering more than just technical components. We needed to deeply grasp how businesses use networks, what keeps IT teams awake at night, and why existing solutions fell short. Each layer of simplicity demanded another layer of insight.
Most teams tackle complexity by adding features. They smooth edges instead of addressing underlying problems. They make current solutions prettier rather than fundamentally simpler.
Real simplicity doesn't hide complexity. It dissolves it. It comes from understanding a problem so completely that complexity itself disappears. Breakthroughs making difficult tasks intuitive start by recognizing what's truly essential and discarding everything else.
ML reasoning models advance relentlessly, generating and testing countless variations. Yet, the crucial insights that eliminate complexity still emerge from human intuition, from clearly seeing what matters and what doesn't.
The best products don't just handle complexity better. They remove entire layers of it. True simplicity isn't easy. But as machines increasingly take care of execution, it's the only advantage that endures.
"Real simplicity doesn't hide complexity. It dissolves it."
great essay
simple is simple but simple is also hard