Wired, The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine, 08.24.09
The central premise:
The world has sped up, become more connected and a whole lot busier.
As a result, what consumers want from the products and services they buy is fundamentally changing.
We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect.
These changes run so deep and wide, they’re actually altering what we mean when we describe a product as “high-quality.”
Entire markets have been transformed by products that trade power or fidelity for low price, flexibility, and convenience.
Some examples …
MP3s
The music industry initially laughed off the format, because compared with the CD it sounded terrible.
What record labels and retailers failed to recognize was that although MP3 provided relatively low audio quality, it had a number of offsetting positive qualities.
By reducing the size of audio files, MP3s allowed us to get music into our computers—and, more important, onto the Internet—at a manageable size.
This in turn let us listen to, manage, and manipulate tracks on our PCs, carry thousands of songs in our pockets, purchase songs from our living rooms, and share tracks with friends and even strangers.
And as it turned out, those benefits actually mattered a lot more to music lovers than the single measure of quality we had previously applied to recorded music—fidelity.
Netbooks
On paper, netbooks might seem like crappy toys.
They have almost no storage, processing power, or graphics capability.
What they do have, though, is accessibility: Cheap, small, and light, they let you connect to the Internet from almost anywhere.
Netbook shipments were up sevenfold in the first quarter of 2009.
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
Kaiser Micrclinics
Instead of building a hospital in a new area, Kaiser just leases space in a strip mall, sets up a high tech office, and hires two doctors to staff it.
They cut everything they could out of the clinics: no pharmacy, no radiology. They even cut the receptionist in favor of an ATM-like kiosk where patients can check in with their Kaiser card.
Thanks to the digitization of records, patients can go to a “microclinic” for most of their needs and seamlessly transition to a hospital farther away when necessary.
What they found is that the system performs very well. Two doctors working out of a microclinic can meet 80 percent of a typical patient’s needs.
With a hi-def video conferencing add-on, members can even link to a nearby hospital for a quick consult with a specialist.
Patients would still need to travel to a full-size facility for major trauma, surgery, or access to expensive diagnostic equipment, but those are situations that arise infrequently.
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80 percent is a magic number — the famous Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule.
And it happens to be a recurring theme in Good Enough products: 20 percent of the effort, features, or investment often delivers 80 percent of the value to consumers.
That means you can drastically simplify a product or service in order to make it more accessible and still keep 80 percent of what users want—making it Good Enough
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Full article:
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/magazine/17-09/ff_goodenough?currentPage=all
Thanks to MSB MBA alum Mike Cirrito for the lead
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The Homa Files 
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