After a few months, Pure Digital could barely keep up with orders. Customers found the Flip was the perfect way to bring home videos to the suddenly booming YouTube, and the camera became a huge hit, selling more than 1 million units in its first year. Today, just two years later, the Flip Ultra and its subsequent revisions are the best-selling camcorders in the U.S., commanding 17 percent of the camcorder market. Sony and Canon are now struggling to catch up.
The success of the Flip surprised the industry, but it shouldn’t have. It’s just the latest triumph of what might be called Good Enough technology. Suddenly, cheap, fast and easy tools are everywhere. We get our latest news from blogs, we make intermittent long-distance calls on Skype, we watch videos on small computer screens instead of televisions, and more and more of us carry around small, low-power netbook computers that are just good enough. to meet our browsing and email needs. The low end has never been higher.
So what happened? Well, in short, technology has arrived. The world has sped up, become more connected and much busier. As a result, what consumers want from the products and services they purchase is fundamentally changing. We now prefer 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 are so deep and broad that they are actually altering what we mean when we describe a product as “high quality.”
And it’s happening everywhere. As more sectors connect to the digital world, from medicine to the military, they too are seeing the rise of Good Enough tools like Flip. Suddenly, what seemed perfect is quite the opposite, and products that seem mediocre at first glance often fit perfectly.
The good news is that this trend adapts perfectly to the current times. As the worst recession in 75 years rages on, it’s light, agile products that are having all the impact: exactly the kind of things lean startups and small-scale businesses are best at. And big sales can come from the impact. “When the economy deteriorated before Christmas last year, we were worried that sales would suffer,” says Pure Digital’s Fleming-Wood. “But we sold a lot of cameras. In fact, we surpassed the goals we had set before the economy deteriorated.” And this year? Sales, he says, have increased 200 percent. (Another reward: In May, networking giant Cisco acquired Pure Digital for $590 million.)
To some, it seems like the shit of it all. But it’s really an improvement. And companies need to get used to it, because the Good Enough revolution has only just begun.
Speaking at an online editorial At a conference in London last October, Clay Shirky, a professor of new media studies at New York University, had a mantra to offer the assembled producers and editors: “Don’t believe the quality myth.” . When it comes to the future of Web media, Shirky sternly cautioned, the reflex to focus on high production values must be resisted. “We’re getting to the point where the Internet can support high-quality content, and it’s like everything we’ve had so far has been nice, kind of a placeholder, but now the pros are coming,” Shirky said. “That’s not true.” To reinforce his point, he pointed to the MP3. At first, the music industry laughed at the format, he explained, because compared to the CD it sounded terrible. What record labels and retailers failed to recognize was that although MP3 provided relatively poor audio quality, it had a number of positive qualities that made up for it*.*
Shirky’s point is crucial. By reducing the size of audio files, MP3s allowed us to bring music to our computers (and, more importantly, the Internet) in a manageable size. This, in turn, allows us to listen to, manage and manipulate tracks on our PCs, carry thousands of songs in our pockets, shop for songs in our living room, and share tracks with friends and even strangers. And it turned out that those benefits actually mattered a lot more to music lovers than the only measure of quality we’d previously applied to recorded music: fidelity. It wasn’t long before record labels were wringing their hands over declining CD sales.
“There comes a point where improving something that was important in the past is a bad decision,” Shirky said in a recent interview. “You’re actually feeding a competitive advantage to outsiders by not recognizing the value of other quality companies.” is.” In other words, companies that focus on traditional measures of quality (loyalty, resolution, features) may become myopic and fail to address other now-essential attributes, such as convenience and shareability. And that means someone else can come and drink your milk shake.
To some extent, MP3 follows the classic pattern of a disruptive technology, as described by Clayton Christensen in his 1997 book. The innovator’s dilemma. Disruptive technologies, Christensen explains, often enter the lower end of the market, where they are ignored by established players. These technologies then grow in power and sophistication to the point of dwarfing older systems.
Surely that’s part of what’s going on with Good Enough technology: MP3s came in at the bottom of the market, were ignored, and then turned the music business upside down. But interestingly, the audio quality was never readjusted upwards. Sure, software engineers have come up with new encoding algorithms that produce fuller sound without dramatically increasing file sizes. And with recent increases in bandwidth and the advent of giant hard drives, it’s now even possible to maintain, share and transport vast libraries of uncompressed files. But better-sounding options have barely gained traction in lo-fi MP3. The big breakthrough, the one that had all the impact, was the move to easier-to-manage bits. Compared to that, the improved sound quality simply doesn’t move the needle.
Of course, there are those who appreciate the richer sound of uncompressed files, CDs, or even vinyl records (considered by some audiophiles to be the highest fidelity format available). But most of us don’t think twice about it. In fact, there is evidence that consumers are simply adapting to the thin sound of MP3. Jonathan Berger, a music professor at Stanford University, recently completed a six-year study of his students. Each year he asked newcomers to his class to listen to the same musical excerpts played in a variety of digital formats (from standard MP3s to uncompressed high-fidelity files) and rate their preferences. Every year, he reports, more and more students privileged the sound of MP3s, especially for rock music. They have become accustomed to what Berger calls the percussive crackle (also known as distortion) found in compressed music. To them, this is what music is supposed to sound like.
What has happened with the MP3 format and other Good Enough technologies is that the qualities we value have simply changed. And the change is so profound that the old measures have almost lost their meaning. Call it the MP3 effect.
We have seen it time and time again. Consider, for example, the rise of cloud computing. For years, software was something you bought and installed on your hard drive. Much of it was created by Microsoft, which solidified its dominance by releasing increasingly powerful and feature-packed updates. But with the advent of services like Gmail and Zoho Writer, many users are turning to the Web for basic tasks like word processing, spreadsheets, and email. These cloud applications have inherent limits: they run through a browser window and cannot directly access your local hard drive or processor. They lack features. Its performance depends on the strength of your Internet connection. However, tens of millions of people use Gmail, while Zoho Writer has 1.8 million users and is growing at a rate of 100,000 subscribers per month. Microsoft, of course, is now jumping into the cloud as fast as it can. Redmond says Office 2010 will be largely cloud-based. Not to be outdone, Google recently announced a primarily cloud-based operating system that will work in conjunction with the company’s Chrome browser.
