Good Enough and Web of Tomorrow

The Web of Tomorrow

The Web of Tomorrow article was predictable but accurate. Kelly’s talk that we watched earlier was more impressive because he mentioned most of the same things but mentioned them 3 years earlier. This article simply mentioned trends that in 2010 were easy to predict would continue. Since I am not in the USA, I’m not sure how all of these trends and predictions have played out there. In Taiwan, we were already seeing these by the time the article was published. Parr mentions this geographical difference,

At present, we focus our Internet use in the U.S. on our laptops. In Japan though, many more access the web primarily through their phones, a trend that is just beginning to sweep the states. This is just the beginning. New Internet-enabled TVs will allow us to browse from the living room and soon our cars will become Wi-Fi hotspots.

My phone has become a valuable companion/extension of my life. It makes my life richer in many ways and it makes me more effective at work. My laptop is only for work and a few games but my phone is an extension of myself.

“Instead of having to jump onto the computer to check your email, you can just have your girlfriend or boyfriend pass you the tablet to check out what's going on.” I laughed when I read this because young people vastly prefer social media over email. If I want to make sure my kids see a message from me, I won’t use email alone. Even though Parr later mentioned the growth of social media, I think it has become even more popular than Parr or many of us might have thought.

 

Good Enough

This article was far more interesting to me. The “good enough” trend is a fascinating one and Robert Capps provided an enlightening treatment of it. I was somewhat familiar with all of the examples that Capps gave (besides eLawyering) but he mentioned things about each that were new to me and changed my thinking.

I was surprised to see that college students’ listening preference has changed from CD quality to compressed MP3 quality audio files. I’ve always thought that music piracy was not a very big concern, in part, because most of the file sharing is MP3 format audio files (although lossless is also common today) and is therefore noticeably inferior to the original. If people begin to prefer MP3 over CD on audio grounds and not just convenience, then it may affect the way I view sharing these files although there are other factors to consider.

The Pareto principle is new to me. Capps writes,

it's because of the famous Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule. And it happens to be a recurring theme in Good Enough products. You can think of it this way: 20 percent of the effort, features, or investment often delivers 80 percent of the value to consumers. That means you can drastically simplify a product or service in order to make it more accessible and still keep 80 percent of what users want—making it Good Enough.

I will need to give more thought to this principle and what it means when applied to different creative efforts I may be involved in including the library where I work and the school system we are a part of. As a perfectionist (most of the time), I feel like I could gain productivity by learning more about when the law of diminishing returns makes continued effort a waste of time compared to putting that time into other tasks.

I am looking to buy a video editing package for our family to use on our home computer. I am only considering software that fits this description of “Good Enough”. Each is missing some features that would be *nice* to have but since there is a 0% chance that I will pay a premium price for software that will have every possible feature, “Good Enough” software will be… good enough.