Read some comments of Torres on simplicity, relating also to Don Norman’s “Simplicity Is Highly Overrated”.

Never too much talking about simplicity.

I’m a fan of simple things. But does simplicity sell? Sometimes I wonder. To give example from consulting playground, I like to make excel models which are straightforward and well commented and pyramidal in structure, so they are easy to follow from the top to the details. Typically excel models are anything but easy to follow and it takes less time to build a new model than to understand one made by someone else. Then again, maybe complex models that you cannot understand seem smarter in the end.

Don Norman:

Why is this? Why do we deliberately build things that confuse the people who use them?

Answer: Because the people want the features. Because simplicity is a myth whose time has past, if it ever existed.

Make it simple and people won?t buy. Given a choice, they will take the item that does more. Features win over simplicity, even when people realize that it is accompanied by more complexity. You do it too, I bet. Haven?t you ever compared two products side by side, comparing the features of each, preferring the one that did more? Why shame on you, you are behaving, well, behaving like a normal person.

Why then:

People buy ipods? I bought ipod. I doesn’t even have a radio. Even my nokia phone has a radio.

People do not buy hybride products? They do buy things that do one thing well.

Why Google rules and not the portals?

Torres:

Simplicity is primarily around the first-run user experience and making sure to optimize the high-volume scenarios. A great example of this is Microsoft Photo Story 3. This tool makes creating videos out of photos a complete no-brainer, even for someone who has never touched a digital camera.

Simplicity is something that everyone wants… but not forever. The simplicity of Photo Story is actually limiting once you want to do something a little more advanced, like running a macro or applying a custom transition. For that you need Windows Movie Maker 2 or Adobe Premiere.

I would argue (and I do quite often) that simplicity in the long run is over-rated for most users, especially for users who actually know what they are doing. (…)

The MSN Search team did loads of research while developing their search service, and what they found is a testament to this. They discovered that search engine loyalty isn’t earned through stellar results for routine queries, but rather through an amazingly unique response to an off the wall query. (…)

Now, “it just works!” is something completely different – and even more important in my opinion. When you plug your digital camera into your Powerbook and your photos are automatically copied into iPhoto, it “just worked”.

It feels strange to me, listen Microsoft people talk about simplicity. And that they did a lot of research into this. Surely they did a lot of research, focus groups and everything on branding. Look at the results. Still, though, for the theory, fine.

Simple on outside, complex in the inside (if you insist), that is, features are there. I’m not Korean and my toster doesn’t need lcd. But I use Google as a calculator and no one I know does it.

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Today, looking for links between RAF and Individual Eleven.

Live event: Brigitte Mohnhaupt, a former RAF terrorist, was released from the prison after serving 24 years out of her five life sentences.

Many of her comrades are already dead, some of them through collective suicide in the prison. The group included and was even named after (Baader-Meinhof Group) Ulrike Meinhof (on the left), who was earlier a journalist with leftist magazine konkret. Even before, according to Wikipedia, she studied philosophy, sociology, Pädagogik (roughly pedagogy) and Germanistik.

In 1970 she became a wanted terrorist after assisting escape of RAF’s leader.

Can’t help but be interested in this kind of people (women).

In her essay “The Concept of the Urban Guerrilla” she wrote:

The urban guerrilla can concretize verbal internationalism as the requisition of guns and money. He can blunt the state’s weapon of a ban on communists by organizing an underground beyond the reach of the police. The urban guerrilla is the weapon in the class war.

The “urban guerrilla” signifies armed struggle, necessary to the extent that it is the police which makes the indiscriminate use of firearms, exonerating class justice from guilt and burying our comrades alive unless we prevent them. To be an “urban guerrilla” means not to let oneself be demoralized by the violence of the system.

The urban guerrilla’s aim is to attack the states apparatus of control at certain points and put them out of action, to destroy the myth of the system’s omnipresence and invulnerability.

I spent some time trying to figure out what RAF was in fact supposed to achieve. The answers by Richard Huffman (recommended reading):

I don’t really think that Gudrun Ensslin, Ulrike Meinhof, and the rest really did much thinking about the “Utopia” that they were trying to usher in. It was all very vague. Mostly, they were concerned with attacking the Capitalist state, and the supposed injustices inherent within it.

The whole problem with most of the European Revolutionary terrorist movements is that for their movement to succeed they had to ultimately generate mass support of the proletariat. For obvious reasons, this never happened. Essentially Baader, Meinhof and the rest adopted an elite attitude as discussed by Debray. They felt that the proletariat was enslaved in the temporary comforts of a a crippling Capitalist society, and they needed to be educated by an enlightened elite; they clearly felt that this was their role. The way to educate the people was to attack the state, provoke a massive “fascist” response, and have the proletariat “learn” the true nature of the German beast. Unfortunately for them, because they were so caught up in the intellectual, internal Marxist debates of the time, the terrorists never really understood that the people — the “proletariat” — would never find their actions appealing.

And last on Ulrike:

Here’s a small bit of “pop” psychology that I have developed about Meinhof: She was a woman plagued by self-doubt. Essentially she had very low self-esteem and spent much of her life attempting to alleviate her self-doubt. Though she was possibly the most famous female journalist in Germany in 1970, she didn’t feel worthy of her success. She told herself that she was a hypocrite for earning large sums of money as a journalist while using her column to espouse radical Marxist and Socialist views. She joined up with Baader, she felt, to “put her money where her mouth was” (–an American expression meaning putting into action the views that a person espouses). As for myself, I believe that it was a more fundamental desire that motivated Meinhof — the desire the alleviate her self-doubt. It was less a political act and more an emotional act.

Of course it didn’t work. Quickly after joining the RAF she was pushed to the sidelines by Baader and Ensslin. She was still very important within the group — she wrote their manifesto “The Concept of the Urban Guerrilla” — but she was not one of the top two leaders.

During her time in Stammheim prison, the other defendants ostracized her. It was clearly this ostrazation that pushed her to commit suicide. Having thrown her lot with Baader, Ensslin, Raspe, etc., she found that she was still plagued by self doubt. But stuck in prison, having turned her back on her old friends, her family, her children, and now her only companions were turning their back on her, Meinhof felt she only had one option left: suicide.

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Leaving aside the crazy and still ongoing Russian experience – I cannot help but notice that it is getting warmer and more urgent to think about some vacation.

Surely enough there is a classical Mexico option linked to the training thing. And I don’t forget about Japan, to follow the asian route.

But what about horse trip in Kirghistan? Or Uzbekistan, can’t tell the difference yet. A Russian colleague inspired me with very nice photos from there. Seems like a great way to combine both horse riding and beautiful mountains in one adventure.

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Si vis pacem, para bellum (if you want peace, prepare for war)

Parabellum

(wikipedia)

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