Recently I was on vacation and I had a bit of time to read for my leisure. The book I read was "The 80/20 Principle" by Richard Koch.
One part of the book really resonated with what we are doing in SharedBook – the chapter about "simple is beautiful."
Earlier this year, we did a shift towards simplicity by publishing our open API as a means for data integration that helped us spread over a variety of technologies for integrating with clients. In addition to our core application we added a smaller engine that processes information from numerous custom-made small applications.
A year ago we were not able to develop as quickly since all development was done in the core application we started building five years ago with J2EE technology. Now we (same people) do it faster, with about 10 projects in parallel supporting new clients and integrations (each varies more than what we used to encounter). The more we work with the open API, the simpler the application will be.
Another thought struck me while reading the book. In the book, Richard claims that simple is beautiful and complex is ugly. He points out that company size reflects complexity and product diversity, so small focused companies are probably better. That actually fits Web 2.0 companies that usually do a single thing well; they are considerably smaller and lighter, which really fits what the author described a decade ago.
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