Here are a few examples:

-- In Massachusetts, 500 doctors were offered their choice of electronic medical record systems at no cost. They were given a menu that ranged from thick client/server applications to hosted solutions based on Citrix to thin-client applications hosted entirely by an application service provider. Amazingly enough, nearly 100 percent of the doctors chose a thin-client, Web-based application, hosted and maintained entirely on the server side. They felt that less infrastructure, less installation and less local patching was ideal.

-- As CIO at Harvard Medical School, I provide e-mail to 10,000 faculty members, students and staffers, nearly half of whom run Apple hardware. Entourage, the Outlook equivalent for the Macintosh, lacks just enough important features to keep my Apple users unhappy. Google's Gmail isn't perfect, but it's certainly good enough for most users and runs with the same features everywhere.

-- The iPod ClickWheel is a perfect example of less being more. In the latest version of the iPod, buttons have been removed, and what remains is a simple, intuitive, highly usable interface that gets the job done.

At dinner with Microsoft executives last year, I asked them to consider a lighter, cheaper, highly reliable version of Microsoft Office. They responded that surveys indicate that corporate customers use 90 percent of Office's features, so there is no one set of minimal features to include in a simplified product. I suspect that a closer look at this data would illustrate that a very few power users need advanced features but that the vast majority need the type of features included in the Gmail editor --fonts, colors and basic formatting.