I'm In Love With My Car

I'm in love with my car
Gotta feel for my automobile
Get a grip on my boy racer rollbar
Such a thrill when your radials squeal.
                    -- From Queen's I'm In Love With My Car

As is typical with Queen, citing the lyrics fail to do the song justice.  You can hear the song and watch the official video here.  C'mon back when you're done.

I learned everything I needed to know about life by listening to what is now called "Classic Rock".  So, yes, I do believe it's possible to fall in love with inanimate objects.  Especially those things with simple, yet elegant, designs.  For example, my daily driver is a 12-year-old Toyota Tundra pickup truck.  It's nothing special...no bluetooth, no OnStar, no time warp technology.  But it runs and looks like the day I took it off the showroom floor.  And it's a simple design.  I love that truck...hope we never part.

Lately, I've been reacquainting myself with an inanimate object (in this case a product) that I really love:  Taleo.  Loved Taleo well before it was assimilated by Oracle and, after recently becoming reacquainted, I've discovered that I still love it.  That love exists for one reason - simplicity:

1. Taleo only does four things: recruit new talent, bring that new talent onboard, manage talent through performance goals, and manage your team's learning.  Four things, nothing more - simple.
2. You won't find feature bloat from over-engineering in Taleo.  There is no attempt to address the exception to the exception to the rule.  Somebody put in great deals of thought about what to leave out of Taleo.  They got it right.
3. The user interface is simple.  Easy to navigate.  Not ground-breaking by any means, but very intuitive.  Users like it.
4. Taleo is only offered through the Oracle Cloud.  No hardware to buy.  Patching, upgrading, maintenance...Oracle does that.  A subscription fee, a browser and an Internet connection...that's all you need to get going.  Simple.
5. Know what happens when you stick to simplicity for your business process scope, feature set, your UI and your underlying architecture?  You end up with an amazing user experience.  Users want to use your product.  Users love your product.

Simple really is the new cool.  I love it when I find it.  And I find it in Taleo.