It's one of the founding principles of the Internet and quite probably what made it the overall powerhouse of information that it is. It's the principle idea fundamental to all proceedings. "Things need to be good enough".
Inevitably, there are certain trends for technology. Someone gets an idea and tries to convince someone else that it's a good one. (This being the Achilles Heel of any project, getting someone else to care about it.) Eventually, they convince a few others and get the ball rolling by launching something quickly. It generally doesn't do everything, misses on a few features, but mostly it works "Good Enough" that folks get the idea and start working with it.
Heck, the lynch pin documents defining standards for Protocols are defined as RFCs ("Requests for Comments"), mostly because the first few out the gate never made it past the RFC stage. They just got implemented.
The odd part is that even if you come up with an incredibly sophisticated protocol that does amazing things, or a new application environment of great wonder, chances are it won't really catch on because there's already a solution that works "Good Enough". (Thus explaining why there aren't a thousand Java or Flash based browsers overrunning the market.)
i like to remember that internet low water mark whenever i read articles talking about the pending demise of the web due to some heavily proprietary system. i guess i just don't see that happening (frankly, neither does the author of the article i'm pointing to, but that's the one that got me thinking about this post.
i'll also note that this doesn't neccessarily hold true for personal preference things like interfaces, (like what desktop you use or if you prefer Google Maps over Mapquest) since those sorts of things fall into the same sort of reasoning that explains why there's more than one car maker and why Baskin Robbins has more than just Vanilla in stock. Still, you can still see signs of this attitude as folks use things like iTunes for Windows and AIM because they're "Good Enough" that they don't really want to switch to something else.
Heck, look at Twitter, which has become so hammered by their success that the meme of the moment is bitching about Twitter being down, yet even though there are alternatives, very few folks take advantage of them. Even with Twitter's shortcomings, it still works "Good Enough" for the majority.
Needless to say, that particular form of social inertia is highly frustrating to folks that do come up with the proverbial better mouse trap, since the world often doesn't beat a path to their door, even when they really, really ought to.
Any monkey with a browser can read my twitter posts just as easily as my blog posts.
Most of my "twitter followers" (well, the real ones at least) are the same folks that visit my Blog. The ones that aren't are more than covered by folks that just visit the blog.
If there's some magical Power of Audience than only Twitter alone has capitalized on, i'm at a complete loss to understand what exactly it is. Most folks use Twitter because, well, most folks use twitter and it's easier than setting up your own solution. Twitter works "Good Enough" that there's no reason to move off it yet.
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I have two random thoughts about "Good Enough".
The first is: Who pays? For example, with the whole Web 2.0 paradigm the people who suffer because of the horrific kludge are the programmers. They're paid to suffer - horribly - and the end user experiences little discomfort. So the cost of it being "good enough" is borne by primarily the vendors. The only thing the user truly has to tolerate is light blue. So that's not such a bad "good enough", although still undesirable and a drain on productivity.
That the user doesn't pay is not strictly true, actually, because I'm tying this on a new machine that I bought almost exclusively because my old machine would cry increasingly loudly when it tried to render pages in the last year or so.
The second "Good Enough" thought is that good enough frequently isn't except at the moment, and the costs are borne disproportionately later on.
Examples: number of digits in Social Security Numbers, Vehicle Identification Numbers, Postal Codes, Seven-and-then-Ten digit dialing, and the IP4 addressing space. And then there's the entire card-based banking system, both debit and credit. And, pushing further, the lack of a US national language law.
Or, you know, that whole Y2K thing, and upcoming Y2k38.
The cost to deal with all of the above problems now is many, many orders of magnitude (the real ones, x10, not the didn't-do-well-in-math-so-I'm-a-manager x2 ones) over the cost to implement an actually "good enough" system.
Interestingly, my Twitter sent earlier today was "Why hasn't Facebook bought Twitter and integrated it into their system?"
And my Facebook status from this morning is "[Callous] is always looking for the general solution."