The proliferation of simple tools

I have a lot of tools. And I've picked up a lot of new ones while working on the house. One thing I've noticed about tools is that the simpler they are, the more of them you tend to have. I can have one multi-bit screwdriver or eight different single bit screwdrivers. I can have three crescent wrenches or a dozen standard wrenches (and a dozen more in metric values).

So I'm going to extrapolate a bit and say that this is true of software too. The simpler your applications, the more of them you'll tend to have.

Which is why the recent talk about getting real and simplicity isn't resonating with me. Because even though the tools are simple, the toolbox and tasks are still complex.

Let's take project management. As much as I like Basecamp (I'm a happy customer) it hasn't really changed my project management universe. In fact, my project management universe is still a tangle of five distinct tools:

Just about everyone I know that touches a project uses at least three of these, and often four. The real value of Basecamp to me is, in three words, "don't need Sharepoint." And seriously, making communication and file sharing easier has been valuable. But it hasn't changed my world, and I'm not sure that any one product could easily take over from the others (and still be simple).

Last week Om Malik wrote about the analytics packages he uses to measure his blog:

Between Feedburner, Mint, Measure Maps and Urchin, I would have a good idea of the readership base and how they are consuming GigaOm content.

Sounds a lot like my blog stats universe:

Does it have to be this complicated? If every tool does just one thing well, then yeah, it probably does.

I'm not arguing against simple tools. By all means, make them. But recognize that less sometimes means more... as in I need more tools to meet my needs. This leads me to two somewhat divergent conclusions:

• Sometimes shit is complicated. Project management can be irreducibly complex at times--because of the people, resources and dependencies involved. The tension, for me, isn't so much between simplicity and complexity, but between complexity, clarity and relevance.
• Simplify my universe. Tidy my toolbox. Creating simple tools is great, but there's tremendous value in reducing complexity in my world (where that's possible). Someone will come along and make it so that Om Malik and I (and probably you too) only need one application to track our blog performance. My Hiptop, for all its flaws, brought my calendar, email and contacts together... collapsing three devices into one. iTunes did the same with music and podcast discovery, consumption and playback. Trillian lets me have just one IM client.

I appreciate simplicity as a design virtue, but I think it's becoming a one-dimensional concept when in fact it's pretty nuanced. If we don't appreciate the nuances we risk simplicity of the wrong kind.