When did innovation die?

I truly believe that work can be enjoyable. I truly believe that there are applications that make you work better, help you deliver value, and become indispensable. Unfortunately, there have been times when I’ve had to use tools that simply don’t make sense—tools that can’t differentiate apples from oranges. Interacting with them feels like spending a day searching for a USB with bitcoin in a landfill. These tools painfully make your day harder.

Once, I had this C-level person complain to me in a frustrated voice:

“Quique, our app is too simple. I don’t want to show this to potential clients. Where are all the buttons?”

To be honest, when I heard that, I froze. I held back because I didn’t know how to respond. Should I laugh and answer sarcastically? Based on that feedback, I had to tell my team to Google “Plane Cockpit” and work like mindless monkeys to design something with all the buttons. This leader wanted to showcase busyness in our business.

You know the kind of busyness I mean—the kind where people emphasise doing 2, 3, 5, or more tasks at the same time. Or the kind where their calendars are so packed with meetings that finding 15 minutes feels like playing Tetris. The kind of busyness where people proudly announce they’ve been working since 4 a.m. and haven’t stopped until midnight. That mindless, dumb, false productivity that in fact, delivers negative value.

I think that’s wrong. I think it makes no sense. An application with more than 45 visible clickable buttons, requiring a headcount of thousands to operate, is losing market share to a simple app with just 5 buttons that barely needs 100 people to run. Why this ridiculous obsession with being the biggest, most complex monstrosity out there? Why this unnecessary hunger for greedy growth? When did innovation die?