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When ‘good enough’ is better than ‘best’
September 3, 2009 | 4:41 am
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By Chris Meadows
Wired has an interesting article on what it terms “the Good Enough revolution”—a growing trend in products and services that are cheap and feature-light being much more widely adopted than top-of-the-line products with every possible function.
The article looks at examples from a wide range of industries—Skype versus regular phone service, the Pure Digital Flip vs. more expensive camcorders, the Predator UAV vs. manned fighter planes, mall-based “micro clinics” vs. complete mini-hospitals—but one example happens to be the Kindle:
Amazon’s Kindle can’t display complex graphics, and paper still has much higher resolution. But the device does store hundreds of titles in a slim package, ensuring that you always have access to whichever Philip K. Dick tale you’re in the mood for. The Kindle is expected to generate $310 million in revenue by the end of 2009. Barron’s estimates that annual sales could reach $2 billion by 2012.
MP3 Sound Quality: “Good Enough”
One interesting point the article makes has to do with how the music industry never saw the mp3’s popularity coming; they thought that the mp3 would never take off because the fidelity of MP3-compressed music was less than CD-quality (which was itself the subject of disdain from audiophiles who preferred the pure analog reproduction of vinyl). Only visionaries like Michael Robertson disagreed.
But it turned out that Robertson was right: portability turned out to be more important to consumers than fidelity. And once consumers were used to the way mp3s sounded, Stanford music professor Jonathan Berger found, they actually came to prefer compressed music over more faithful reproductions.
Every year, [Berger] reports, more and more students preferred the sound of MP3s, particularly for rock music. They’ve grown accustomed to what Berger calls the percussive sizzle—aka distortion—found in compressed music. To them, that’s what music is supposed to sound like.
“Good Enough” and the iPod Touch
One point from my own experience that the article does not bring up is the example of the iPod Touch versus more full-featured computers, or even versus the iPhone. In my daily life, I discover that I use my iPod Touch and a wifi connection to do about 80% of the things I could do on a personal computer or laptop. (Some bloggers—apparently prompted by Steve Jobs—even declared that the iPhone basically is a netbook—causing much controversy thereafter.)
I can check my mail (and even write compose reasonably short replies), check and update my Twitter and Facebook and LiveJournal, browse the web, listen to music, buy and download e-books, even hop onto Internet Relay Chat or the private MUSH-style chatserver where my friends hang out. I can even view my Windows desktop remotely via VNC, or ssh into my Linux server’s console. And today I discovered I can even (theoretically) use it to host a TalkShoe podcast remotely, too.
Thus, if I am going to be moving around a lot, I can generally get by without a heavy laptop that would only weigh me down. As long as my iPod Touch is with me, I can do most of what I want to do (which is more than I could do before I had it) in the field, and the rest can wait until I am home again. “Good Enough” is, well, good enough.
And as I mentioned here, the iPod Touch is also “good enough” compared to the iPhone: users can do almost everything they could with the iPhone, without having to pay those hefty smartphone fees.
“Good Enough”? Good Enough!
The number of examples the Wired article brings up are amazing, and once you start looking for them you can see them across all aspects of life. Motor scooters are “good enough” for people who don’t need cars. Twitter is “good enough” for people who don’t have the time to post blog entries. And, of course, e-books are “good enough” for people who don’t want to have to store paper books, or need the instant gratification.
The “Good Enough revolution” is here to stay, and it will be interesting to see how it influences our culture from now on.
Technorati Tags: Skype,Kindle,Flip,MP3,Michael Robertson,good enough,good enough revolution,Wired,iPhone,iPod Touch,Twitter,Predator
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Comments:
Everything in the article is true except the idea that “good enough” is new or revolutionary. “Good enough” has always been with us as has its counter-part; “gold-plating” aka kitchen-sink or checklist design. In engineering design both approaches have been around since, well, forever. The latter appeals to the Madison Avenue hucksters who prey on the uninformed by dazzling them with long list of features (to extract higher prices) while the former appeals to knowledgeable buyers who understand the product and their own needs.
This is old stuff; the Ford Model T suceeded because it dropped fancy features and provided basic transportation. A generation or so later, the VW Beetle did it again. And other car brands keep using the technique to get into the market. Basic transportation sells. The margins are thin without the gold plating but the volume makes up for it and a smart company can build up a lot of brand equity to drive business to more profitable models as long as they remember that value is defined by meeting customer needs not by their PR departments. Companies that forget this tend to get swept away.
In computers, this has happened over and over; DEC mini-computers were dismissed by the mainframers as cheap and underpowered until they took over a major chunk of the business; a decade later, the DEC folks pooh-pooh’ed microcomputers until they ate away most of their business. Today microcomputers are everywhere and DEC is but a memory. Even in the PC business, the first portables (Osbourne 1) were dismissed as impractical because of the compromises portability required but Adam Osbourne simply smiled and moved on, comforted by his mantra of “Adequacy is Sufficient”. That was nearly 30 years ago.
Today, no better example exists of what happens to a company that forgets the Pareto rule (aka the 80/20 principle of value) than Sony. Their over-priced, over-featured TVs and and gaming consoles are routinely outsold by lower-spec and lower-priced competitors in practically all markets, world-wide.
(The 80/20 rule even has a role in the ongoing debate over health insurance reform in the US, but since politicians are lawyers and liberal arts types they literally don’t get it. A whole ‘nother can of worms that.)
For ebook readers, the impact of the Pareto rule can be seen in the quick demise of the Sony 700 readers, which came with every hardware-based feature Sony engineers (obviously working in a sealed tower somewhere) could cram into it except the two most prized by users; readability and wireless. Of their current lineup, going by the Pareto rule, one would expect the 300 to florish and the 600 to lag. The daily edition? An interesting experiment in value assessment; is wireless worth US$200 over the 300?
Keeping features lean and practical (and focused on customer needs–whether those needs be basic transportation or portable music) is a lesson ebook publishers need to bear in mind, especially the promoters of the typographically rich but undercooked epub ecosystem which is loaded with publisher-friendly frills like embedded fonts, hard-coded/non-overideable margins and faces, and of course, obtrussive DRM, while lacking support for dictionaries, standard anotations, or even a compliance testing program with teeth to let usets know if the problems they face with a given file are an issue with the format, the file or the parser. Putting consumer needs last is a great way to drive customers to your competitors and can dig you into a hole from which recovery will be at a minimum dificult as Sony can attest to.
“Good is enough” is no revolution; it is merely the status quo in competitive markets where end users rule. It is merely a reminder of the perils of ignoring end user needs because it is end users that choose winners and losers, not pundits, experts, or standards bodies.
My mom preferred instant coffee to brewed. It’s just not right.
Kindle isn’t cheap, I think all the readers are way too expensive. But they are good enough to read with, depending on what you’re reading.
I don’t expect they’re going to even compete with paper and ink for textbooks, reference, technical type non-fiction until they have more comparable features.
I don’t know. Considering the last quote I heard from some of the recent freshmen moms at work, I think they’re competing quite well with the Kindle. (Locked in audiences are always such fun).