Microwaves, like all technology, have been overcomplicated by the weakest link. Sure, the dial worked fine, but what about people who don't know how long to pop popcorn? We don't want to make them have to learn, so we better build a microwave with a 'popcorn' button and write algorithms that take the size of the bag into account and produce the correct cooking time. A classic example of technology being over-engineered to suit the absolute laziest of users. What would happen if people had to figure out on their own how to make popcorn? Less people would eat popcorn? Unlikely. Less people would buy microwaves? Even more unlikely.

The same thing happens to me when building information systems, people complain that they need a feature to control some minute business exception that occurs in 1 out of every 1,000 iterations of a process, but do they really need that? No, there are other, more simple ways, like using the provided comment field to mark the exception. However, the user would then actually have to READ the comments (of which there are maybe 2-3), and well that's just way to much effort.

To make things worse I have a webmaster here who bends right over to adding new buttons and features in ever spare inch of control realty to accommodate such asinine requests. So many things could just as easily be fixed with a minor change to a business process, or a personal education process in the case of microwaves. However, people want technology that does absolutely everything for them, and rarely do they consider the actual complexity of such technology.