[barrkel]

It's also why software is a pop culture. Sophistication and completeness is seen as complexity and cruft by each successive generation, who start something new and simple.

I don't think it's very avoidable. Tech is genuinely getting incrementally better, but it's usually in a sawtooth pattern.

[freshhawk]

I'll agree that sophistication and completeness is often seen as complexity/cruft but it also always comes with actual cruft as well since improvement is incremental and breaking APIs is annoying.

My favorite aspect of this cycle is when some features in the complex software become seen as so useful as to be required and standard, so when the new simpler version is created they have to figure out a novel way of providing that useful functionality in a simple and elegant way. And they do it, sometimes knowing they have made a significant advance and sometimes without knowing.

[scott_karana]

Do you have any examples of that second case?

Sounds too good to be true... but I'd love to be proven wrong :)