As technology develops, people are using an ever broader and heterogeneous range of ICT devices and network-based services. The result is an enormous burden of complexity on the shoulders of users, service providers and network operators. Excessive complexity, in turn, creates obstacles to effective exploitation and acceptance of beyond 3G systems and paradigms such as ambient intelligence, context-aware services, pervasive computing and novel access technologies. The goal of the Simplicity project, supported by the European Union, is to reduce this complexity by: i) providing automatic customization of user access to services and the network; ii) automatically and user preferences; iii) orchestrating network capabilities. This short paper presents the Simplicity project, its initial outcomes (including a sketch of the system architecture), and tries to identify future research directions in this challenging field.