Last week’s iPad release got me thinking about doing more with less – something that Apple has mastered. BI vendors could learn a lot from this.

The iPad, iPhone, and iPod all do wonderful things for you but are easy to use and elegantly simple. Because of that, the iPod and iPhone have dominated their markets. The iPad is creating its own market, but if there were any competitors Apple would dominate them, too.

BI tools, on the other hand, are often so stuffed with features they’re cumbersome to learn and use. This keeps them from becoming pervasive.

I’ll explore these thoughts further in a future article.