This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: Complexity = goodness Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

I think Patrick Logan is onto something here:

I think it also comes from the customer side... I continue to see a lot of behavior in large enterprises that seems to believe anything of *value* (not just cost, mind you) should by definition be big, complicated, and even cumbersome.

Really. I think the portal vendors, like other kinds of vendors, are just capitalizing on these behaviors. "Selling" something as simple as a Wiki, or even as simple as Smalltalk, is *more* difficult than selling the more complicated and costly approximations.

He's got a point there. How many applications that ought to be simple end up being massive 3 tiered monsters? How many people reflexively dismiss a simple client/server solution to a problem, because clearly you need a scalable N tier architecture - even in cases where the number of end users will be small? face it - developers absolutely wallow in complexity...