as he already said, it has to accomplish some goal, if your goal is for your car to drive, it needs an engine.
And this presumes that the requirements lead to perfection. What is the goal of the Mona Lisa or Dante's Inferno? Could Micaelangelo have done less to satisfy the requirements for the Creation of Adam?
Can you point to any value in that quote?
And let me extend my last question. How many things can you list that would be perfect merely by removing things? I don't think there are many. I suspect most things, that even accomplish a goal, lack perfection due to an array of things, not simply due to having too much of anything.
But this is exactly the type of reasoning that this silly quote leads to. That simply having less makes something better.
Apple could easily make a computer with no keyboard, no mouse, no OSK, no visual display. Simply a touchpad, to input a binary code that corresponds to text and numeric output that corresponds to what color and x,y location to draw pixel. Of course, this numeric output would simply be a binary light. But that's just stupid.
The reason you add something is almost always because there is a goal that you'd like to accomplish. Yahoo probably thought you should be a click away from your email account. Google doesn't.
“I'm sorry I wrote such a long letter. I did not have the time to write a short one.” - Abraham Lincoln
The point isnt to have less, its to have as little as possible required to perform the function you want, anything extra is just extra mental energy required to be able to understand it.
Have you ever written something and then vastly reduced it because you realise you are conveying the same thing in different ways, or written software and realised you have made 2 ways to do the same thing? thats all it means.
"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler" -- Albert Einstein
Einstein captures the fact that you need to both add ("as possible") and keep simple. The original quote does not, although apparently some people have a preface to the quote that has a whole bunch of assumptions that make the quote work. I've never seen that preface.
Edit: actually, it appears that Einstein never said this famous Einstein quote. According to Wikiquote, here is what he did say:
It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.
Hardly as catchy! But it does make explicit the qualifier -- without surrendering adequacy -- that applies equally to Saint-Exupéry as well.
The point seems to be that creation is a process that is first additive, then subtractive. Mere agglutination is inferior.
My point is you don't add stupid stuff, but you don't blindly say not to add something, and simply look for things to remove.
http://en.thinkexist.com/quotation/i-m_sorry_i_wrote_such_a_...