In this space, more than once, I’ve argued that in developing new products or services, less is more. Eliminating needless features is a far more powerful route to  market success than adding, endlessly, more and more new and unneeded features. What we want today, more than ever, is simplicity, not complexity. And erring on the side of simplicity is better than erring in excess complexity.

Now, Apple — according to Business Week, the company most admired as an innovator by other managers worldwide — has shown it gets it. Apple’s Leopard operating system, Mac OS X 10.5, has a new release, called Snow Leopard.  And, surprise, it is smaller, faster and more refined. Less, rather than more. It beat its announced release date by a whole month. And, get this, it costs only $30 (as an upgrade, for those who have Leopard already).

Snow Leopard starts up faster — 72 seconds, rather than 100 seconds in Leopard — and opens programs faster — 3 seconds for the Web browser (Windows Internet Explorer, eat your heart out!) — and halves the opening time the second time the same program is run. And above all, Snow Leopard is half the size of Leopard!

Writing in today’s International Herald Tribune, David Pogue notes that “Apple and Microsoft realized that the pile-on-features model was unsustainable”. *

Microsoft will release Windows 7 in October. We may see a strategy similar to that adopted in Snow Leopard. If so, those of us who have followed Microsoft’s incessant pile-on-the-unneeded-features-and-charge-more-for-them will be pleased and surprised. 

Pogue concludes: “The big story here is not Snow Leopard. It is the radical concept of a software update that is smaller, faster and better — instead of bigger, slower and more bloated. May the rest of the industry take the hint.”   

And my prayer is, may all innovators everywhere, not just in software, take the same hint. Leopards everywhere — you CAN change your spots.

*David Pogue, Mac’s new Leopard: A lot more from a lot less. IHT Aug. 27, 2009, p. 15.