"Good Enough" Products Often Die a Quick Death

The Wired article "The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple is Just Fine" focuses a good part of its argument on the Flip, a bare bones video camera with easy sharing capabilities. It came out around 2007, was purchased by Cisco in 2009 and by 2011 it was dead. Surpassed by the easy and simple video sharing capabilities of smart phones like the iPhone, Cisco discontinued the product. Was the product still useful? Sure. But people increasingly had the same ability to take the same low-quality video with superior products they already had in their pockets.

The Wired article also points to netbooks as an example of a good enough product that was enormously successful. The article says, "On paper, netbooks might seem like crappy toys. They have almost no storage, processing power, or graphics capability. What they do have, though, is accessibility: Cheap, small, and light, they let you connect to the Internet from almost anywhere. Netbook shipments were up sevenfold in the first quarter of 2009." But where are netbooks now? Gone. As this Bloomberg article from 2013 puts it, "The Netbook is Dead. The iPad Killed It." Tablets with their high graphics capabilities, better storage, decent processing power AND internet accessibility gained popularity, became less expensive and thoroughly dismantled the netbook's place in the market. The netbook's only redeeming factor was it's ability to go online and nowadays all most all technology can access the internet. 

The article also mentions Hulu as an example. While Hulu is still up and running, its business model has changed enormously. In 2012 its viewership dropped 58 percent and since then Hulu dropped free viewing but it still has ads. Is this good enough? Probably not because consumers can pay around the same price per month for Netflix and receive no ads. Additionally many networks offer free day-after viewing on their own websites now. 

"Good enough" products, especially good enough products that are technology based, are placeholders - temporary fixes. These products' business models start to fail when quality products emerge that incorporate the same features (plus better features) and they die completely when quality products become comparable in price. 

There is nothing wrong with being "good enough," but good enough is not enough to build a sustainable business on. As a person I value simplicity, but as a consumer I am wary of products that claim simplicity but are really just of low quality. Usually this means you are just not getting enough bang for your buck.