If your product is too simple it is easily copied by a competitor. Competition for limited customers is where most feature creep comes from. The fear that if you don’t do X then a customer will go elsewhere. When you are catering to the whims and sales cycle of 20 or 30 customers all hell breaks loose.
If the simplicity is artful, then the copy just “doesn’t feel right.”
Anyone remember the Movado watch? When it came out, there was nothing like it. A lot of competitors tried copying it, and they just looked cheap.
It eventually fell out of fashion, but it commanded top dollar, the whole time, despite the copycats.
I never liked it, and would not have brought one, but I have to respect the design.
The same could be said for Apple’s stuff. Not all of it is something worth copying, but they are a multi-trillion dollar company, regardless of the hate heaped on them.
Nowadays, it’s actually fairly easy to copy complex stuff; especially if a lot of that UI is the result of leveraging standard chrome in a framework.
This. I grokked this when I tried to contribute to Unigram (an alternative Telegram client) in 2021. Back in school and even university circa 2010, what I expected from chat apps is passing around text messages salted with a few UI features like parsing and displaying emoji, highlighting links and maybe sending files. These days there are hundreds of types of messages alone, plus you also have all kinds of metadata exchange, social graph stuff, group management etc. When writing this comment, I feel like the whole IM industry would win from following Unix philosophy a bit more. But it is never going to happen because companies want to lock users in.
