Back to basic ..... "less is good"

b

The idea that “less is more” has many adherents in architecture, design and fashion, the technology industry has historically espoused the opposite view. Products should have as many features as possible; and next year’s version should have even more. As prices fall, what starts off as a fancy new feature quickly becomes commonplace—try buying a phone without a camera, a car without electric windows, an SLR without autofocus, auto detect, etc, — product design companies everyday are in the move to add new and more features in an effort to outdo their rivals. Never mind if most of these new features are excess and not being applied or used by consumers. In the product design race and to capture more consumers to the ideas or features, more is always good to have nevermind if need to have.

Are there signs that technologists are waking up to the benefits of minimalism. Consumers are more and more into looking for things to just work, and strong demand from less affluent consumers in the developing world not wanting complicated features and paying more for not using them. It is telling that the market value of Apple, the company most closely associated with simple, elegant high-tech products, recently overtook that of Microsoft, the company with the most notorious case of new-featuritis. True, Apple’s products contain lots of features under the hood, but Steve Jobs has contain with a knack its techno for concealing such complexity using elegant design. Other companies have also prospered by providing easy-to-use products: think of the Nintendo Wii video-games console or the Flip video camera. Gadgets are no longer just for geeks, and if technology is to appeal to a broad audience, simplicity trumps fancy specifications.

Another strand of techno-austerity can be found in software that keeps things simple in order to reduce distractions and ensure that computer-users remain focused and productive. Many word software now have special full-screen modes, so that all unnecessary and distracting menus, palettes and so on are disabled or hidden; rather than fiddling with font sizes or checking e-mail, you are encouraged to get on with your writing. If the temptation to have a quick look at Facebook proves too much, there are programs that will disable access to particular websites at specified times of day; and if that is not draconian enough, there are even some programs that can block internet access altogether. A computer on which some features are not present, or have been deliberately disabled, may in fact be more useful if you are trying to get things done as likely you will feel that the processing speed now works faster than before. There are no distracting hyperlinks on a typewriter.

Frugality is the essence of invention ?

The coming of “frugal” innovation—the new ideas that emerge when trying to reduce the cost of something in order to make it affordable to consumers in places like China, India and Brazil. The resulting products often turn out to have huge appeal in the rich world too, especially in the present era of belt-tightening when all of us in this continent are facing up to the economic crisis. The netbook, or low-cost laptop, was inspired by a scheme to produce cheap laptops for children in poor countries, but has since proved popular with consumers around the world. Tata devised the Nano, the world’s cheapest car, with India’s emerging middle classes in mind; it is now planning to launch it in Europe, too, where there is growing demand for cheap, simple vehicles. Of course, there are pros and cons to such cheap vehicle, safety is one big concern to the users.

All this may offers grounds for hope. If the feature-obsessed technology industry can change its tune, perhaps there is a chance that governments—which have also tended to be inveterate believers in the idea that more is more—might also come to appreciate the merits of minimalism. 

What about today's rig building business, where some rig owners always looking for more drilling features into their rigs and do not mind paying for these extras??   Are they getting their returns higher and faster than those rig operators with basic functional rigs which are also capable of "drilling" the wells with though lower dayrates as compared. Probably these expensive or rich rig owners should start to look at simplicity and the risk of running into well accidents may also be beneficial in the sense "less is safer" !