I had this discussion with the head of the company I'm at recently. Some of our software has succeed by being easy to use, encapsulating business rules so the

I had this discussion with the head of the company I'm at recently. Some of our software has succeed by being easy to use, encapsulating business rules so the client doesn't have to worry them, that kind of thing. All good, we make money there. However, we had a project that ultimately was less successful because we tried to make something EASIER that was simply not easy at the core. I don't want to get into details but ultimately we took a job originally done by folks with big spreadsheets and those folks had lots of domain knowledge ... and we tried to make it a job anyone could do. IMO, we largely failed, as we brought on new customers we realized there were assumptions about every dang column and everyone they exchanged this spreadsheet with thought different things and had different rules and some used some fields some not and ... I realized this was a complex task immediately and you just couldn't hide that. In fact it was better to just give them a massive spreadsheet interface and let them go hog wild or just offer to have our own internal people do the job for them. Some stuff is just complex.