Wired examines a trend within the marketplace that they refer to as the “Good Enough Revolution” and/or the “MP3 Effect,” a change in consumer priorities that favors ease of use, availability and price over quality. As in all paradigm shifts, this one is uniquely suited to the times, given our increasingly plugged in lives, where immediacy and output are king, in combination with the collapse of the economy that sees people across the board spending less. Under this thinking products and services are designed to reach the widest audience – ignoring the hardcore users and experts whose needs are different – with bare bones functionality that can accomplish A to B, and at a price that virtually anyone can afford.
The Flip Video Camera is a perfect example of this kind of technology. What it lacks in relation to its high end competitors – picture, features and controls – it more than makes up for with its out of the box simplicity, a mobile product made for the YouTube generation.
Wired points to the broader manifestations within society:
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.
The bleed over into the service industry is particularly fascinating, driven by online connectivity and again, speed – no more waiting in line or scheduling appointments – the ways we are getting our legal advice and receiving health care are getting updates. E-lawyering services that deal in documents and legal advice and micro-clinics and “web visits” that provide basic medical care, sit at the forefront of this new wave.
The implications of all this make us wonder though, are our expectations simply changing or are we lowering the bar? After all, technology is supposed to dramatically improve our lives, not just make them okay.
Wired: The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine
[image via deanj on Flickr]
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Lowering the bar? Let’s be serious here. To bring simplicity into product design is probably one of the tougher design feats. I think this is more a statement about an overloaded, ever-accelerating society that is waking up to the nonsense of companies trying to sell you better, faster, and more. Feature creep, anyone?? Simplicity. You don’t need more. You need things that work, are functional, somehow aesthetic, and last longer than the blink of an eye. Dieter Rams knew a thing or two.
September 4th, 2009 at 5:17 am
It’s not that we’re lowering the bar. We’re experiencing things differently and that means a change in our requirements. I love shooting video, but I’m not a pro. Until the flip cam, all the other cams were a bit too complex for what I wanted. The same with YouTube. It’s not that I don’t like watching HD TV, but I’m not always at home and also the setup to get PC video on the TV is not worth it. It takes 15 minutes to do it for a 5 minute video.
So I think this is just a shift where people are increasingly interested in a lot of areas where they weren’t before, and this at a shallow level.
September 8th, 2009 at 6:15 am