Good morning. It's September 14, 2004. It's my wife's birthday. She turned...., well let's just say she's still as beautiful as ever.

I've been trying to start a company and it's going very slow. I got a call from a headhunter yesterday and I sent him a resume. I might be interested in going back to work.

Having a company isn't really so much work, so maybe I'll keep it even if I get a job. Maybe that's why it's moving so slow. I'm not a good salesman because I tend to qualify everything. It all seems to be about getting your name out. Oddly enough, I thought that it if I built a better mousetrap, the world would beat a path to my door. I have no doubt that I have a better mousetrap, but the grass is growing on the path. I think you need to put up lights and signs and send out mailers and make calls and do demos and barter discounts and generally make a nuisance of yourself repeatedly, before anyone knows that the mousetrap even exist much less take your path. But I've done some of that and maybe I'll start getting some results. Maybe not.

One thing that I'm coming to realize slowly is that in the world of science, people like complicated solutions if they're going to pay good money. If it's a simple solution, it begins to look obvious and they start to think that they already thought of it. They like to believe that it's just a little more complicated than they could have figured out and, maybe more important, it has to look that way to the boss.

The truth is that simple solutions are much harder to come by than complex ones. If you have a problem, then you can just try to fix all the implications of the problem. That's how we approach a lot of things in life. "Don't just stand there, DO something." A simple solution has to fix all the problems at once. Often, really good simple solutions don't fix the problem at all but instead, back up a step and take a different path and the problem disappears altogether. But you really have to understand the whole picture to do that and that takes time. Often the whole picture doesn't reveal itself at once and so the simple solutions that we ultimately find take a while to show up.

There are a lot of examples in the world. For you computing types, the world wide web is a simple solution to a lot of the horrible complexity that was growing out of the client-server approach to utilizing networked computers. Another example for you pop culture mavens, is the iPod. The number of buttons keeps going down, not up. The limited real estate on the iPod Mini drove the design of what turned out to be better and simpler controls. And so it's used on the full sized iPod even though more features could have been added with the available real estate.

Of all the gazillion explanations, this kind of thinking, where complexity seems better to a lot of people, is the only explanation the I've been able to come up with for why Microsoft is more successful than Apple. In fact, it's why Microsoft is successful independent of Apple. People will pay for complex solutions, maybe because the complexity of the solution obscures the nature of the problem itself and makes it seem more intractable and therefor deserves big bucks to solve.

So the bottom line is that design will ultimately converge on simpler things (which sometimes is a complex thing witha simpler interface) because that's all our patience and intelligence will stand for. And that's good for us. Life is complicated enough without someone making it worse.