While I personally would prefer to follow the "good design is as little design as possible" mantra, it's not a principle that should be followed in all cases. Dieter Rams is speaking from a modernist school of design philosophy, and while many companies/brands are adherents to this school, not all are.

For example, from a graphic design or typographic design perspective, designers like David Carson (http://www.davidcarsondesign.com/) have demonstrated the power of postmodernist approaches for certain brands. If brands like ESPN or Wired adopted the "as little as possible" approach to graphic design, your experience with those brands would be much different to your experience today. Wired magazine would be black on white with symmetrically placed photos and no visual decoration. That's as little design as possible. For some people, this might be an improvement to Wired, but the problem is that if they delivered a magazine like that, you would have no idea that it was in fact Wired. You would forget the brand and possibly never buy their magazine again.

So this principle - and just about every other principle Dieter Rams lists as good design - is very specific to the brand he was working with when these principles were developed: Braun. That's not to say that these principles are not excellent. They are. But they are specific to their context. And the design principles that you develop for your product or brand should be specific to your context.