In the technology world we're always after the next big thing, the differentiating feature that our competitor doesn't yet have and that will give us the edge. The emphasis is always on adding stuff, and hardly ever on staying lean and focused. This is mostly good for innovation, but not necessarily good for the end users.

It's always striking to me to see how many of the really successful companies out there can be differentiated by what they didn't do. The concept of narrowing down your vision, concentrating it on a smaller subset of what's possible has sometimes surprising repercussions. Here are some famous examples:

• Twitter: not only do they limit tweets to 140 characters, they've also kept their site surprisingly light and simple, letting 3rd parties do the work of extending their core functionality for them. Can you imagine how many people have likely suggested to Twitter adding multimedia to tweets or fancy ways to arrange threads?
• The iPhone: it only has 1 central button. It also has 3 other buttons and a switch but at its core it really just has one button. I have no doubt the Apple designers filtered thousands of suggestions to add either a few more buttons to the front-end or even a full keyboard. Of course they had to do a great deal of innovation to overcome this limitation but that's exactly my point: sometimes you need to limit your options in order to truly get creative.
• Google and Craigslist: they mostly use plain markup, very close to basic html. Over the years each site has probably had hundreds of consulting firm pitch them projects to pimp-up their pages with all sorts of eye candy. And yet they've made the conscious decision to stay very simple.
• Woot.com: they sell only one item per day. Of course they get around this limitation a bit with wootoffs, but the vast majority of the time there is still just one item per day.
• Stack Overflow: the popular site only answers programming questions. It would be easy to say, once the initial concept has proven successful (which it absolutely has), to say "ok let's expand this to all technology questions". But instead Stack Overflow created a second site, also focused on a specific topic, Super User. Sure they use the same engine, look the same, and probably have a large overlap in their communities but nevertheless, each site is focused on one area and does not expand for the sake of expansion alone.

It's easy to see why this is a rare thing, why consciously limiting your focus is difficult. Managers,  Board Members, Shareholders, they want to see growth, deltas, news, they need to see visible changes. If you've got the project team that goes to a CEO and says that they have decided to add nothing new, they'll probably be a lot less likely to say that again next quarter because they'll no longer have their job.

And yet, it's always easier to not do something in the first place than it is later to try and scale back in a re-focusing effort. So remember: sometimes, the correct decision is to do nothing, and sometimes you'll need to work your butt off in order to look like you did nothing.