Occam's razor is the principle that "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity" and the conclusion thereof, that the simplest explanation or strategy tends to be the best one.

No where does Occam's razor appear to be more true than in product design and development.  Over a dozen years of building products, I've found that nearly every time the simplest solution to a problem ultimately tended to be the best one.  Unfortunately, in many cases the simple solution wasn't the one that we originally implemented, but through iterative development we ultimately found ourselves reverting to the solution which was simplest.

During design and development, massive amounts of time and resources often gets allocated to trying to solve the use cases that only apply to a small percentage of the customer base.  Shouldn't you spend the majority of your time focused on the use cases that the majority of your customers falls into?  Worse yet, you will often create a more complex solution for 95% of your customers in an attempt to try and satisfy the 5%.  Simple solutions are much cheaper to build and the maintenance costs often are increase exponentially along with complexity. 

Some basic rules for creating better products by focusing on simplicity:

• Focus on 95% of your customers not 5%
• Ask yourself is there is simpler way of doing things rather than, is there a better way.
• Provide a single way of accomplishing a function rather than many different ways.
• Avoid the urge to build comprehensive solutions right from the beginning.