Simplicity, Tier 1 and making pigs fly

Tier 1 solutions are typically large robust solutions that are implementation heavy. In other words - not simple. Each Tier1 has a great deal of inertia in the form of business rules. Some make more sense than others, but all must be implemented! These pigs must fly! These are the requirements - make it happen.

Apple is the icon of simple elegant design. Doing specific things very well. But will scope creep infect Apple? The major reasons this doesn't happen is that Steve Jobs runs things with well-documented incredibly iron-fisted discipline. Conventional thinking said that serious business users wouldn't submit to Steve's way or the highway. The fallacy was two fold:

1. in an increasingly complex and information overloaded society people like simple and elegant solutions
2. people want to be cool Apple is the new cool, and lots of execs want to be hip. That's why they now pay lip-service to things like usability and read stuff on their ipads.

Mid-market out of the box software is the Apple of enterprise software, little configurability but works well with the pareto principle. The tier 1 solution, is a platform, you name it it can do it. But it'll cost you. You can get a consultant to make pigs fly. However if your archaic requirement for wings be made in wax don't get pissed when they melt in the sun.

Apple has added terrible multi-tasking to relent to requests. What's next? I'm interested to see that as apple continues to grow their customer-base will they submit to feature-creep to gain people who want more options (such as droid?). Will they be able to balance simplicity and feature-creep? Most tier 1's have tried with some of the brightest minds with little success thus far.