A couple of months ago I bought a Flip Mino HD camcorder. While most camcorders are proud of their exhaustive feature list, the Flip takes the opposite approach. Here’s what David Pogue had to say about the original Flip in his review:

The screen is tiny (1.5 inches) and doesn’t swing out for self-portraits. You can’t snap still photos. There are no tapes or discs, so you must offload the videos to a computer when the memory is full (30 or 60 minutes of footage, depending on whether you buy the $150 or $180 model). There are no menus, no settings, no video light, no optical viewfinder, no special effects, no headphone jack, no high definition, no lens cap, no memory card. And there’s no optical zoom — only a 2X digital zoom that blows up and degrades the picture. Ouch.

At the time of writing, the Flip had captured 13 percent of the camcorder market.

Another quiet trend is the rise of the Netbook. As noted in the most recent issue of Wired:

Inspired (or perhaps a bit scared) by the OLPC project, Asustek…began crafting its own inexpensive, low-performance computer. It, too, would be built cheaply using Linux, flash memory, and a tiny 7-inch screen. It had no DVD drive and wasn’t potent enough to run programs like Photoshop. Indeed, Asustek intended it mainly just for checking email and surfing the Web. Their customers, they figured, would be children, seniors, and the emerging middle class in India or China who can’t afford a full $1,000 laptop.

Traditionally, development trickles down from the high end to the mass market. PC makers target early adopters with new, ultrapowerful features. Years later, those innovations spread to lower-end models. But Jepsen’s design trickled up. In the process of creating a laptop to satisfy the needs of poor people, she revealed something about traditional PC users. They didn’t want more out of a laptop—they wanted less. (Italics mine)

By the end of this year, the humble Netbook is expected to capture more than 12% of the laptop market. In a mature and saturated segment, that is quite remarkable.

What is going on here? How can devices that do a whole lot less be so successful? Isn’t it all about features and capabilities and the latest technology? It seems that the for the vast majority of customers, they really only need a very small set of features; record a video, play a video, surf the web, check email.

In his book “In Pursuit of Elegance“, Matthew E. May writes about the power of elegant design:

Elegance is an elusive target, which explains why it’s so rare, and in turn so desirable. Experiencing elegance is nearly always profound. The unusually simple yet surpisingly powerful nature of any elegant this or that gives us pause, and the impact changes our view of things, often forever. Elegance delivers the power to cut through the noise. It can shake markets. It can change minds, and mindsets.

May breaks elegance down to four elements: Symmetry, Seduction, Subtraction, Sustainability. To be truly elegant, the collective execution of all four elements is required. However, there is no denying the power of “subtraction” on its own, where it is the process of “taking away” that adds value. So a cheap Netbook may not qualify as “elegant” according to May, but is is certainly striking a chord inthe marketplace. My Flip Mino certainly feels closer to “elegant” than the latest HD camcorder from Sony.

The challenge for product strategists and marketers and designers is to develop the discipline to strive for less, not more. This doesn’t mean masking complexity with a simple facade, but striving to understand the essence of the design and then staying true to that vision. We can also take a lesson from the great Michelangelo; when asked about how he carved his statue of David, he replied:

“I saw David through the stone, and I simply chipped away everything that was not David.”