“Complexity sells better than simplicity.”
Renata Kolbe’s 1998 essay on enterprise procurement, archived at Static & Chrome, still reads as current. She was writing about mainframe contracts, but the argument travels untouched to every dashboard built since.
Her claim is blunt:
Complexity sells better than simplicity. A simple tool sells once. A complicated one sells forever — first as the tool, then as the training, then as the consultant who explains the training, then as the plugin that hides the consultant.
The word doing the work there is forever. Kolbe isn’t describing a bug in how software gets sold; she’s describing the business model, stated more plainly than anyone selling software would say it in a deck.
Three ways the incentive shows up, in ascending order of how well it’s disguised:
- Certification programs — pay to learn the product, pay again to prove you learned it.
- Consulting tiers that exist only because the base product shipped underdocumented.
- A plugin marketplace that exists because the core stayed too rigid to extend without one.
It shows up in smaller places too:
- a config file with forty keys where four would do
- a settings screen with a search box, because scrolling stopped being viable
- an onboarding flow longer than the feature it explains
Invented for this fixture; Kolbe’s essay predates YAML by a decade.
Here’s the kind of object Kolbe would have pointed at if she’d lived to see one — built mostly to be discovered, not used:
retry:
strategy: exponential
jitter: full
max_attempts: 7
backoff_multiplier: 1.8
circuit_breaker:
enabled: true
threshold: 0.5
Most callers just want retry: true. The other nineteen keys are there for the training course.
Kolbe’s closing line is the one worth keeping: a simple tool is a cost center for exactly one vendor, and every other vendor in the room already knows it.