The Triumph of Good Enough Tech

Wired Magazine recently published the article The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple is Just Fine, which focuses on the success of the Flip Video cameras.  I was struck by the valuable lesson to be learned from the success of the camera: “quick and dirty over slow and polished.” Keeping it simple, cheap, and getting it in the consumers hands quickly is much more valuable than making it perfect.

An interesting excerpt from the article:

The Flip’s success stunned the industry, but it shouldn’t have. It’s just the latest triumph of what might be called Good Enough tech. Cheap, fast, simple tools are suddenly everywhere. We get our breaking news from blogs, we make spotty long-distance calls on Skype, we watch video on small computer screens rather than TVs, and more and more of us are carrying around dinky, low-power netbook computers that are just good enough to meet our surfing and emailing needs. The low end has never been riding higher.

So what happened? Well, in short, technology happened. 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.

Jonathan Kaplan and Ariel Braunstein, the creators of the Flip Video, noticed that most people only use their expensive camcorders for shooting simple video. So, they made a  cheap camera that only shoots simple video! The Flip Video camera is far from the best camcorder available. It’s not even close. But it’s the most successful. These little cameras cornered 17% of the U.S. camcorder market.

The success of this camera demonstrates a powerful lesson: a product does not have to be ‘the best’, but simply good enough. ‘Cool’ extras that aren’t essential to accomplishing the product’s central goal won’t necessarily increase the value of your product and may only complicate and increase cost. “Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect.” Keeping it simple, cheap, and getting it in the consumers hands quickly is much more valuable than making it perfect.

We follow the Agile development process, which stresses quick iterations and getting new features to users as quick as possible. With Agile, your product may not be perfect the first time your users see it, but it will be good enough. It’s the 80/20 rule, get it 80% complete, get it out, and figure out the last 20% as you go.

One of our goals this month is to simplify Rypple and focus on our core strength; getting you feedback. We too fell victim to adding ‘cool features’ that were not really necessary. Marg Campbell, one of our trusted advisers, described Rypple, in her Rypple TV video, as “quick, dirty, and to the point!” We’re keeping this great line in mind every time we think of releasing a new feature!