Good Enough...

Seth Godin had a great post yesterday about the next big idea being products that are good enough. It raises a fundamental question for a lot of us in business. Not "what is good enough for my customers?", but "what is too much for them?"

I remember when I was in product marketing at IBM working on consumer PC's, one of the things we had a bad habit of doing was stuffing the machine (and entire package) with tons of stuff. More powerful and faster components, lots of game software, CD's galore of all ilk, regardless of the fact that much of our research came back telling us that most of our customers used almost none of it. All of it added cost to the machine and we somehow felt compelled to add more than our competitors, yet most of what we added made no difference in the purchase decision. What would have happened if we had added "just enough?" focused on making the PC's "good enough?" We will never know since IBM dropped out of the consumer business at the end of the last century and eventually sold the entire PC division to Lenovo.

It also reminds me of the exchange I once heard about that happened between the Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov and Joseph Stalin. Apparently, after years of trying, they had finally obtained a sample of American Plutonium. Stalin wanted to know how it compared to it's Soviet equivalent. When he was told that the Soviet Plutonium was more pure, Stalin apparently danced for joy, feeling that his team was being more successful at making the stuff. Sakharov looked at him and simply said "Yes, but their bombs still blow up the same as ours."

In that case, good enough was just that. Are the products you make "good enough" or are you fighting for that extra feature, widget or piece of software that does nothing for your customers except add cost and end up making the product harder, not easier to use.

Thanks Seth.