Slashdot Mirror
Is "Good Enough" the Future of Technology?
himitsu writes "In an article titled 'The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine,' Wired claims that the future of technology, warfare and medicine will be filled with 'good enough' solutions; situations where feature-rich and expensive products are replaced with bare-bones infrastructures and solutions. '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."'"
Look at a large amount of government systems. Everything is to the cheapest bidder. But the cheapest bidder isn't always the best or product, and contains issues. Also known as 'good enough.'
I myself use maybe 10%. There are parts (of Windows Vista) that I have never explored and will never explore. I just do not need all that functionality.
I bet that the majority of non-technical users are just like me. Suppose that Microsoft created a "good enough" operating system called "Windows Minimum" (WM). It has 10% of the functions of Windows Vista and 10% of its size. WM would also likely be 10 times more reliable since it is small and easy to verify to be correct. Best of it, WM would likely be 10% of the price of Windows Vista. $20 is just about right for most people.
My line of work - which is patent law, crucify me - brings me in contact with a lot of mechanical engineers. One complaint I often get to hear from the older ones is that in ye olden days, most people in management were engineers themselves, who had worked up their way through a lifelong career. Those were the days of quality products, of taking pride in the excellence of your work. Now, as MBAs have taken over, we have the days of producing as cheap and sloppy as you can get away with. This may be partially nostalgia-filtered, but I guess it has some reality to it.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Contrary to popular believe its always been the case that tools and machines were made just good enough.
The definition of "just good enough" depends almost entirely on the cost to manufacturer any given device.
When a given tool is manufactured, its engineered to withstand its expected life span, within the budget available.
If you know you can buy a plow that will last for 20 years for X dollars, and a longer lasting plow for a lot more money, you immediately start thinking about how much cheaper it will be to build the same plow in 5 years, after the new mine is open, and the new forge set up. If its going to be cheaper, you don't bother beefing it up.
Things in the past were built to last their expected life time (or the life of the owner), or the duration for which the device is needed.
Per unit Cost, and per unit lead time to manufacture just about anything has shortened progressively over the centuries.
We don't need the plow, the ship, or the building to last that long any more, and in fact it is detrimental that they do, because that delays progress of new technology. Its easier to recycle it and build next year's model, which will be cheaper.
I don't see anything new here. Its been this way since dirt.
Even my long dead grandfather used to complain "They don't make em like the used to".
Thanks for that.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The most well-known example of technology overkill is Windows XP and its successors. Think about it for a minute. How many of the functions in these operating systems do you actually use?
If an OSS advocate made this same argument as a reason to adopt Linux and OpenOffice, you'd have the OSS detractors screaming at him for not understanding business and productivity. I recall quite a flame fest over replacements for Adobe products a day or two ago.
Windows is popular despite that it is only good enough. Linux dominates the OSS market despite its myriad shortcomings. Plenty of better solutions have come and gone, but good enough solutions spread like wildfire because they are not actually optimized to be solutions. They are optimized for one thing: spreading.
Just callin' it like I see it.
LOL. "Good Enough" is euphemistic code for average, mediocre, unimportant. So expect all future consumer products to exhibit that quality. Oh wait, most products already do, compared with products from 10 to 15 years ago: cars, software, movies, books etc. Is Windows 7 significantly better than the almost 10-year old XP? Other than its new GUI, it has nothing to offer other than slow, bloatedness. So why the hell should humanity improve technology if we don't get to use it while big, fat, CEOs use cheap materials and labor to increase their profits?
If you support open source, good enough will be the norm, as in, "Linux is good enough for my software needs, I don't need/want anything else." Since open source products have less competition (hard to compete with a $0 price tag), the need to improve the product will be almost non-existent. In contrast, with closed source, there is constant competition to deliver better products as each competitor works hard to improve his product and steal his competitor's profits.
Recently, I read an article on slashdot that OSS UI development should stop imitating Mac and Windows, and should start innovating. Also, I've read various things from Eric Raymond and others that OSS should be prized for its innovativeness. But I think that's all wrong. OSS is most valuable when it's not innovative. The most successful OSS projects (like Linux, gcc, mysql, OpenSSL, and others) have been shameless clones, while the innovative OSS projects (like Hurd) died off. Of course there are exceptions, but usually OSS software is the generic drug of the software industry.
There's nothing wrong with that.
I am tired of all that "people are stupid and don't want quality" and "worse is better" crap. This is not true at all.
People want quality products that last, unless they are overpriced. The problem is, it's much harder to recognize quality, especially in modern products, thus there is no market pressure for it. But there is a market pressure from the investor's end to produce as much things as possible.
Ultimately, it's an issue of asymmetric information and trust. Consider buying a computer. Say, you have a 2 year warranty period in EU. You have two choices - one for 200$, and the other for 300$, but the producer claims it will last at least 3 years (but the warranty is still 2 years). So, which one are you going to choose? The cheaper one of course. Because you have no insurance that the other will not last say 2.5 year, in which case you would be screwed. This is a classic situation on a market with asymmetric information, as described in George Akerlof's Market for Lemons.
Furthermore, the companies want to sell as much product as they can. Company building products to last 20 years (with warranty, so assume you can trust this deal) would be at a disadvantage to company making products to last 5 years, because the profits of the latter would be higher (it costs more to produce 4 products than 1, so with the same margin, company can make more profit). In history, companies (mostly found by idealistic engineers) believed that building quality product is better, but in the 70s the MBA types they installed instead realized they are wrong, so that's why it went downhill ever since. Even if you would try to switch companies, if all of them are doing that, it gets useful.
It's just normal capitalism in play, but most people didn't know the rules at the beginning, and now that large companies started to optimize by the rules, it's just not fun anymore.
I appreciated your examples of items that are "good enough". This is also how I feel about most of my purchases.
I disagree, however, with your statement that we "compromise quality" in making these choices. Juran (an American whose ideas on quality helped drive the post-war Japanese manufacturing boom) defines quality as "fitness for use". In his and many other quality-researchers' definitions of quality, quality requirements are subjective and different for each person. I.e. my "fitness for use" is different than Bill Gates "fitness for use" (interpret that in BOTH it's intended meanings!).
Bottom line: If your personal requirements for a car are, seats 4, costs less than $25k, gets >30 mpg, the Matrix is higher quality than the Lexus, based on "fitness for use" to you.
>>>assuming most end-users would get this 'WinMin' OS instead of WinXP/Vista
I'd simply run Win95 or NT 4. Have you ever seen how fast these OSes operate on a modern PC - zoom-zoom! I've never understood why somebody somewhere doesn't take these ancient OSes, add a few extra drivers like USB, and run them. Win NT 4 can run on just 8 megabytes! Imagine how cheaply computers could be made if they only used ~1/500th as much RAM.
Today's modern OSes really and truly are top-heavy monstrosities.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Reminds me of a guy laughing about the amount of precision his job required -- he worked under that mountain from which World War III was expected to be fought. Radio interviewer asked him about accuracy of the missiles used.
He said with what they were throwing, hitting anywhere in the time zone would suffice for their purposes.
Then he laughed and said no, no, only kidding.