notes and views on crm, social media, and the human side of information technology

Why “good enough” is good enough

Humans strive for perfection. Or do we? David Schatsky of Jupiter Research reviews the trend to towards cheaper and less-than-perfect goods and finds it interesting. I find it symptomatic of a well-known phenomenon - Moore’s Law.

Compact cassette was introduced in 1963 and hasn’t been end-of-lifed until early 00’s. Compact Disc is about 20 years younger, and is already on the verge of obsolesce. While MP3 is nowhere close to be unseated as the current format of choice, it will eventually meet the same end.

When standards change too quickly, it doesn’t make sense to invest too much in “getting it right” since we’ll have to be getting something else right very soon.

Computers: faulty, replaced every other year. Software: faulty, updated sometimes even daily (day doesn’t come by without apt-get upgrade delivering a couple of megabytes of freshness). Good enough is good enough since time spent on quality is time that can be, and has to be, invested in staying on the leading edge.

In (consumer) technology, we appreciate greatness but newness even more.

And since technology is already good enough, the drop in our ambition to reach perfection is perfectly understandable. High-brow audiophiles notwithstanding, the beats coming to our ears from the iPod’s 128kbps MP3 create a roughly the same emotional response than the same beats coming from a $20000 speakers. And that computer that blue-screens every now and then still does the text processing and photo editing job quite well.

A player in this ever-changing market cannot really choose between good and great. The shorter his innovation lifecycle, the less perfect his products are. And vice versa, the longer the products’ shelf life, the better they ought to be. You don’t expect to have your house “updated” or even “upgraded” every couple of months, do you?

Final point: the more tolerant we are towards imperfect products, the more we expect the other things to be without flaw: customer care, buying experience, communication at all touch-points. Companies and the relationships have have with them usually outlast their products. Hence the need for CRM to be one of those long-term investments that have time to mature and blossom. Here, good enough is clearly not good enough.

Additional reading

April 23, 2008 | Filed Under CRM, Enterpreneurship 

comments

2 Responses to “Why “good enough” is good enough”

  1. Alec Muffett on April 23rd, 2008

    Hi Tomas,

    Just a couple of slightly-on-topic quick links that may be of interest to you, from a famous essay upon the rise of “worse is better”; I think you may find them interesting :-)

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

    http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
    - alec

  2. Tomas Kohl on April 23rd, 2008

    Good stuff, thanks! :-)

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