Awhile back, there was some discussion about the degradation of product
quality, both on the manufacturer side as well as the consumer
acceptance side. I ran across this Business Week article which seems to
hit the nail on the head:
http://tinyurl.com/29tvfy
By Stephen Baker <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Commentary: Why "Good Enough" Is Good Enough
Imperfect technology greases innovation--and the whole marketplace
Say you have a crucial conference call in an hour and your phone goes
dead. What do you do? A generation ago, this wasn't much of an issue, at
least in the U.S. Phones in the days of the Bell monopoly were
engineered to be "mission critical." You picked up one of those heavy
receivers back then, and the dial tone was as prompt and reliable as
water from the tap. It worked.
Yet these days, even as we pack global multimedia in our pockets, phone
service sometimes seems to march backward. Andy Beal was one of 220
million subscribers to Skype, the cut-rate Internet telephony service
owned by eBay (EBAY <javascript: void showTicker('EBAY')> ), who saw the
service go dark on Aug. 16. A software glitch kept it down for the next
two days. Founder of the Raleigh (N.C.) Internet marketing consultancy
Marketing Pilgrim, Beal learned that Skype was out an hour before
clients were to call him from Holland. He had to message them in a
hurry, telling them to call his tenuous backup: the cell phone. "It was
embarrassing," he says. But at least the cell phone worked--which isn't
always the case.
Are communications getting worse? Not by a long shot. We're surrounded
by miraculous machines and services, most of them calibrated to a level
software engineers have long called "good enough." In the right
circumstances, good enough is great for the entire economy. A
marketplace that's not hung up on fail-safe standards is open to risk
and innovation, and drives down prices. Ever since the dawn of the
PC--the archetype for a good-enough machine--inventors have been freer
than ever to piece together and launch their visions. Some are
brilliant, some are half-baked, many are a blend of the two. A precious
few are up and running 99.999% of the time--Bell's old standard. But
they cost far less to build.
The rise of good-enough technology raises different questions for
do-it-yourselfers and major corporations alike. It's no longer whether
we can afford a technology, but more often whether we can afford the
disruption if and when it fails. Is it critical? Do we have backup in
place? Many of us face this question every time we venture from our
office with a cell phone. We don't have "one machine that works all the
time," says Dave Morgan, chairman of Tacoda Inc., a New York advertising
company. "We have lots of alternatives that work most of the time."
The upside of this sloppy status quo is enormous. Consider Andy Beal. He
pays Skype about $60 a year, plus a couple cents for foreign calls. This
gives him global telephony wherever he wanders with his laptop. He calls
the service "seamless." He recently switched most of his office
work--including e-mail, contacts, and calendar--to free Web services.
This, of course, entails risk. In late July, an electrical outage in San
Francisco brought some of the biggest sites, from Craigslist to Second
Life, crashing down for 12 hours.
Beal's data reside on Google (GOOG <javascript: void showTicker('GOOG')>
). The search giant is in fact an example of a major corporation that,
like so many small fry, bets its business on good-enough technology.
Google's data centers, the heart of the company's operations, consist of
hundreds of thousands of commodity computers wired into a vast global
network. These computers are little more reliable than yours or mine.
Many die and are replaced every week. It could be that one of them at
this very minute is issuing its dying blinks--and taking down Andy
Beal's contact data with it. But if Google is working as designed, it
links customers to another copy of those files or Web pages stored
elsewhere on the network. Every computer has a legion of backups.
Success, in the good-enough economy, means racing ahead even as the
machines supporting us sputter and break.
Richard P.
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