Another insightful little snippet, or meme, from Seth Godin on the topic of good enough. The idea being that just because something better enters the marketplace doesn’t mean it’s going to dominate, because there may be something already there thats “good enough”. Seth’s example is the philips head screw, a better screw might get designed but the philips head screw is good enough. Seth’s Blog: What sort of screws are in your house?
I’ve been thinking about this recently from the standpoint of HD DVD, the industry is getting excited about it, but IMHO DVD is “good enough”. DVD is one of the fastest adopted technologies ever, over the course of 8 years over half the TV owning households in the world have a DVD player. Lots of reasons for this, but one of them was that VHS wasn’t good enough, in comparison to DVD.
In the end it is a cost/benefit. Does the adoption of the new technology require change? Or is it just an incremental innovation? Changes to the customer experience should be weighed against what change the customer is going to experience. If you have a tonne of customers using an existing interface, a redesign may make it better, but the change is going to be painful to the customers currently using it. Good enough is also better the devil you know.
