Asked in an edition of Lee Gomes’s “Talking Tech” column for the Wall Street Journal, about SAP’s reputation for delivering software that is reputed to be more complicated and less usable than it has to be, SAP Chairman Hasso Plattner had this to say:
“To a large in extent, it's the consequence of the company's success. The broader your software, the more people are using it and pressuring designers of the software to move in different directions. So the overall complexity keeps growing.”
Plattner continues,
“Where you give software developers a choice of doing the simple thing or the more complicated thing, they go for the more complicated thing, because there’s more reward for doing it. They’ll say ‘Anybody can do simple stuff. The complicated stuff, only we can do.’”
At Microsoft, nothing could be farther from the truth. We’re committed to making our software simple and usable. It’s in our DNA. I think any of our developers would tell you that there’s an art in designing applications that are truly simple—both in their architecture and in the user experience. We find rewards in crafting tools that people want to use, that help people do their jobs. We take pride in keeping it simple.
One of my favorite quotes is attributed to Mark Twain, “If I had more time, I’d have written a shorter letter.” The same principal applies in software design. Designing simple, elegant solution to complex problems is the art of software engineering. It takes time and effort and it’s the art we promote every day.
When software gets too complex, your business can suffer. That’s why we made Microsoft Dynamics AX simple to deploy, simple to manage, and simple to use. But don’t take our word for it—take a look at how global enterprise companies Sematic and Dodla Dairy chose Microsoft Dynamics AX over SAP to simplify their operations, drive cost savings, and increase business agility.
Leonardo da Vinci said "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication", we could not agree more.