Thoughts On the Good Enough Revolution

The good enough revolution as written in the latest Wired magazine by Robert Capps is an interesting concept. The idea is that companies only need to make products good enough for a mass market user group to be successful. But what the masses want has shifted from the highest quality they can afford to getting what is good enough. Products need to be accessible, easy to use and shareable. For instance, the article talk about MP3’s as the perfect example of good enough tech. The sound quality isn’t nearly as good as CD’s or their earlier incarnation Vinyl, but the MP3 format has become the choice of most users to buy (or pirate) music. It doesn’t sound as good, but people can store hundreds of MP3’s on an I-pod Nano, and upload their own MP3 files onto the net easier.
The article made some interesting observations, the health and military industries are currently going through their own good enough revolutions. MQ-1 Predator Drones are being used by the military in many combat zones. They don’t go very high, or fast, and only hold 2 rockets. Not nearly as fast high as many of their fighter jets or bombers, but what he Predator can do is scan an area for almost 20 hours without a recharge, much longer than a pilot can fly without needing a break. Plus if they are shot down, they are cheaper to replace than a fully manned jet (and more humane, at least to the pilot.)
You get the idea, as long as a product is able to do it good enough for a specific job which people want then that product can do well in the market. We are seeing it everywhere, flip cameras, net books, even the future of legal advice is changing because of the good enough revolution. elawyering is emerging as a new way to give legal advice. Richard Granat designed and marketed applications that people who need legal advice can use on the net without seeing a lawyer. For example if a couple is going through an easy divorce where the two parties are more or less agreeable with each other, they can upload an application and answer certain questions, and the application can give them the paperwork they need to file the divorce. Of course this won’t replace lawyers as there will always be messy divorces and other lawsuits where people need to talk face to face with their legal representative, but for certain purposes elawyering is good enough.
This makes me wonder though, how long will the good enough revolution last? As long as a product does 80 percent of what we want, we seem to be happy-for now. Will quality diminish and die out? As almost every generation predicts as they see the world change in weird and interesting ways? Is there any genuine reason for concern or optimism because of the good enough revolution? I don’t know the answer to any of these questions; I know the world will continue to evolve as people evolve. New ideas are shaping the world all the time and it will be interesting to see how far and how long the good enough revolution will last.