This month, Wired published a fascinating article on the “Good Enough Revolution” – how products that trade power and features for low-price, convenience and flexibility transform entire markets. What MP3 did to the CD, the Flip did to video, the Predator to aerial surveillance, Kaiser Permanente’s micro-clinics to healthcare and e-lawyering to the Legal profession.
In my opinion, it was Steve Jobs who, intentionally or not, spearheaded the Good Enough Revolution. As a power-user, I had for long scratched my head why Apple would release good hardware and a rock-solid operating system (Mac OSX) with a bunch of good enough applications (mail.app cannot hold a candle to Thunderbird, iPhoto cannot compete with Adobe’s products, Quicktime not with Flash or vlc… – only Safari seems to be an exception), until it occurred to me that this was intentional. And Apple would not shy away from de-featuring its own products (iMovie in iLife08, so they kept iMovie HD around, now QuicktimeX as part of the Snow Leopard update, so they kept Quicktime 7 Pro around) to stay razor-sharp in tune with this philosophy.
The same is true with the iPhone. The camera seems to be capable of doing 720p video, but that’s more than what Good Enough users need. The camera app is good enough to take pictures and upload them to Facebook and Flickr, which is again in tune with the Good Enough vision. Trade down features for speed of development, reduced development cost, flexibility and accessibility from anywhere.
Kudos to Steve Jobs for realizing this and focusing the entire company on this vision!
Where does that leave us power-users? On the iPhone, Steve Jobs leaves that market to the developers who market prosumer apps like Photogene or Photoforge to do advanced editing. On the Mac, Apple leaves the market to its own professional software division (Aperture, Final Cut,…) as well as other third party developers.
Do you think that Steve Jobs is the Master of the Good Enough Revolution? Or did Apple get it right accidentially?
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