Adam Bosworth, an ex-microsoftie now at Google, posted a talk he gave at ICSOC04, where he defends simple design. It is an excellent talk on high level technology design, reminding us that complex is not always good. It is something that is very important to keep in mind, particularly for someone in grad school, such as myself, where "elegant" solutions are worshipped. In the real world, it is frequently the ugly, primative, yet intuitive technologies which succeed. His arguments are very similar to the concerns that Tim Bray has voiced about the so-called web services stack.