[cbetz]

economic incentives typically lead firms to look for new sources of revenue. they hope to achieve this extra revenue with minimal cost, ideally by not creating new products or developing new customer relationships. the natural side-effect of this situation for software companies is that they add feature-upon-feature to existing products in an endless quest for growth. at the very end of the road this situation doesn't usually work out well for the product, the user, or the company.

on the other hand there are plenty of services/applications that keep stable interfaces for many years at a time. they do not extend themselves too far beyond solving the problem they originally tried to solve. we can all imagine what craigslist would look like in the hands of short-term profiteers, endlessly tweaking the interface for more ad clicks and "user engagement".

the success of sites like the original google search, craigslist, and HN proves that the "do one thing, keep it simple" model is successful and can often be very profitable in the long term. sadly, it is very easy to forget about such ideals when people are constantly dangling fresh money in your face and/or you have salaries to pay. while page rank might be considered the key element to google's genesis and explosion, we also owe much respect to the people that decided and continually insisted that the UI stay clean and minimal.