It’s an adage as old as time (or at least as old as the invention of the personal computer): Technology is destined to cycle constantly between complexity and simplicity.

Remember the hassle of attaching peripherals in the days before USB ports? Remember the anguish of developing applications for competing OS interfaces before HTML? We fixed those problems, and whaddya know, we moved on to others.

“Complexity grows over time,” says Bryson Koehler, chief information and technology officer (CITO) of The Weather Company in Atlanta. “Systems are built to do one thing, and then they’re modified, morphed and bastardized to do things they were never meant to do.”

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