This is a principle our industry implements poorly. It often seems like each new generation (for very small values of the word generation) must reinvent the same thing. Perhaps because the old thing was too complex to understand immediately... complexity driven by the needs of the underlying problem... complexity which the new implementation will inevitably obtain if it survives long enough and becomes popular enough that anyone cares.

(That said, I'm highly in favor of innovation of most any kind; building new things is great, if the new thing has some plausible innovation over the old thing!)