The spoils of network ownership seems to go to the startups that tap into the user behavior of Complexity Avoidance. That’s right, something akin to mass laziness drives billions in market value.
The mantra of simplicity is well known. From the Steve Jobs worshippers, to the designers of Twitter. Entrepreneurs love to tout simplicity. What is less discussed is the other side of the coin: people aren’t just attracted to simplicity, they are avoiding complexity.
There is an entire industry in avoiding Salesforce, and I pay these renegades happily. My CRM stack is a stack (of Pipedrive, Tout, and others) because I don’t want to mess with Salesforce training and rigging, even though in theory Salesforce solves for my complex needs more effectively. I just don’t want to fuck with it.
There is another huge industry in avoiding the Adobe Creative Suite. Not just the “Open Source” movement with their software, I mean hordes of apps which I also use like Acorn and Sketch. Yes, I could use Creative Suite. Heck, I paid over a thousand dollars just to avoid opening Creative Suite; watching a tutorial for the tenth time so I can remember how to use some obscure feature isn’t worth the frustration.
Complexity Avoidance tends to unbundle services. For instance, MasteryConnect and BetterLesson are separate technologies, because simply providing quizzes and grading and simply providing lesson planning is better than bundling those together in some complicated enterprise platform. Half of the Higher Education technology market is driven by Blackboard avoidance.
A complex offering never feels all that threatened by a simple offering. If you represent a complex offering, there’s so many other things to point to that create value. But on the horizon there’s an invisible inflection point where the menu of a la carte, unbundled, simple offerings make the need for a complex offering moot. It’s not the ordinary laws of competition that are tough, it’s the asymmetrical warfare of unbundled offerings.
A deeper complication is that unbundling is recursive over time. It’s only a matter of time before the unbundlers get unbundled. There is always a tension in adding functionality with keeping it dead simple. Functionality gets added to serve the demands of customers, and then more functionality gets added to respond to adjacent market opportunities. A few years go by, and considering the explosive rate of networked entrepreneurship, you don’t have to get all that complex for users to avoid you altogether and something new and dead simple to come along.
Complexity Avoidance of Users is in direct contrast with the Vendor Fatigue of Buyers. In my market, Education, the desire to serve more and more customer needs to capture greater and greater value isn’t just tempting, it is the way of the land. Complexity Avoidance is particularly ornery in cases where the organization is buying software with the idea everyone organization-wide should be using it. But instead, everyone avoids using the organization-purchased app and instead uses whatever feels good for them. A company can feel successful because it’s winning deals, but it may not match actual penetration, adoption, retention and loyalty on the ground.
The best companies seem to celebrate their vigilance in designing for Complexity Avoidance. I know it’s cliche, but I point again to the case of Apple. At all of their product launches they pat themselves on the back because they knew how much hard work and thought it took to say this one thing: “Look at this powerful, miraculous product we’re launching. We’ve hidden all the complexity from the user and it works like magic with the intuitive touch of a single button.”
Complexity Avoidance doesn’t have an easy answer. It is the hard thing about this particular hard thing. It is not a problem that you solve, it’s a tension your company has to manage and manage elegantly. You need to do the hard work of setting up your customer development, product management, and design culture in order to effectively create and ship product walking the tight-rope of this tension.
And if you are lucky enough to become a successful growth company, know that you are sailing the uncharted seas of complexity avoidant users on one side, vendor fatigued buyers on another, ahead of you is the Death Star incumbent and behind you are a bunch of little unbundled services offering gaining ground.
