The author encourages the completeness concept in software and emphasizes the advantages of focusing on stability and reliability instead of adding new features.

The author shares six ideas after working in the software industry for 45 years.

First, Understand the Problem.

Key Takeaways:

• Complexity is the greatest impediment to a software company’s growth and profitability.
• Development costs increase exponentially with respect to the complexity of your code base.
• The choice between speed and simplicity is a false dichotomy. Investment in simplicity is investment in speed.
• Few executives recognize the cost of complexity because they don’t understand the nature of the products they’re selling.
• Software is a product like no other — a hybrid product-service with a very unique warranty.

My takeaway from these stories is this: Once you’ve learned enough that there’s a certain distance between the current version of your product and the best version of that product you can imagine, then the right approach is not to replace your software with a new version, but to build something new next to it — without throwing away what you have.

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