Zen is not for value judgments

Simplicity may not be as obvious as first thought ...

"A blog called "Presentation Zen" has generated a lot of buzz for a couple of posts that smugly satisfy what an audience wants to believe: Bill Gates and Visual Complexity and Gates, Jobs, and the Zen Aesthetic. Readers feel righteous in the easy digs at Microsoft's busy PowerPoint slides, particularly when compared to Jobs' spare presentations.

And when I first saw those posts, I thought, "Yeah! Spareness! Simplicity! Whoo!" Bet then I wondered, "Um, isn't Bill Gates worth a gajillion dollars? Isn't Microsoft an exceedingly successful company? Should we maybe look at this a little differently?"

And I wonder: Maybe Microsoft is giving people what they want. Obviously, it's all about context. And Microsoft's contexts are very different from Apple's. Steve Jobs never really explains anything. He simply shows products. He pretty much just gives demos. Bill Gates, in the presentations critiqued by those posts, is trying to explain something... And explain something that contains a fair bit of complexity. And Bill's audience is likely quite different... Bill is trying to communicate to developers, who are wondering about the ramifications of Microsoft's decisions on their livelihood."   continued ...   (Via peterme)

Zen Simplicity.