It's complicated -- but why?

I've always hated a certain word-processing package, because it is is just too complicated and powerful for most people. Would you let a kid play with an automatic assault weapon? ¹ And yet people daily do untold harm by their uninformed use of this particular tool. That's just one example though. There are lots of others, in software and in real things, although many of the overcomplicated real things have software at their heart, I suspect.

My new digital recorder brought this home to me forcefully. It is a beaut, and does all sorts of things that, frankly, I am unlikely ever to want to do. I know this because I am one of the few people I know who reads the manual. I like the new recorder a lot, but the reason I bought it was that it proved impossible to find a digital recorder that just did high-quality recording from an external microphone.

I have a video camera that takes pretty good stills, and a still camera that takes even better videos. My phone does both, and records good sound, which neither of the cameras is capable of. All the things do everything. My feeling, often, is that this sort of feature-creep reflects not what the average consumer wants or needs but a kind of let's give it to them anyway, it hardly costs any more attitude on the part of engineers or, more likely, marketing executives.

On the word processor front there is, of course, a plethora of lovely, simple, stripped down writing tools, one of which I'm using right now precisely because it doesn't process the words, it just records them. And, perhaps because they aren't very complicated and don't require small armies of engineers to maintain and "improve," these tools aren't very expensive either. I can't get my clients or colleagues to use them, but at least they do exist.

When it comes to physical objects, though, simple high-quality is impossible to find, probably because the market is too small.

Unless you know better.