Excellent interview with Clay Shirky in CIO Insight on the growth of social technologies in business:

We’re used to the CIO being presented with two lists: Product A has 17 features, and Product B has 32 features, so B must be better. With social tools, it is very often the opposite. I see this with my students in a seminar on the production of social media tools. They come back and say, “We took this out for user testing, and the users ask for fewer features.” That’s a persistent pattern.

On simplicity driving adoption of social tools:

The cognitive model is to treat the computer not as a box, but a door. It’s something you need to get through to get to the value on the other side. People don’t want a door with 32 different kinds of handles; they want a relatively transparent view of the other people who are using the system. The software that’s become most ubiquitous has launched with almost no features—that’s true for the launch of Blogger, the launch of Twitter, the launch of wikis. Now you’ve got blogs that have lots of features because they’ve become mature, but the basic idea of what a blog does was so simple, and it was that simplicity that drove it.

From an architectural standpoint, software that's simple on day one, and highly extensible with plugins & extensions is at the heart of this principle because people can always begin with the simplicity, whether they start today, next month, or next year. Then, as they become proficient users, they'll realize what additional features they need, and can add them via plugins. That, in my opinion, is the biggest change Enterprise 2.0 brings to the way people think about using software tools to reach business goals.