It's Good Enough For Me

I am a big proponent of "good enough" technologies. I had a flip camera when they first came out, and I used Facetime/Skype all summer while I was studying abroad. Since I was in England all summer bought an English SIM card for my phone. I paid about $30-$40 for unlimited data in the UK and most of Europe. The network I used didn't have the best coverage, but it was cheap and accessible everywhere I traveled. It was as the article says "good enough." I could always Facetime or Skype home and I never had to worry about how many texts I was using as long as they were iMessages. Or I could just use Facebook to message people. If I got lost I could pull up a map - it might have been slower than others but at least I had it.
To me this article seems to have a lot to do with attribution theory that we talked about in the beginning of the semester. Quality is not the only thing people are looking for anymore. Of course professionals will always pay for the top of the line (you aren't going to see a videographer walking around with a Flip cam). But I don't think the good enough mentality is a bad thing. Especially if the price reflects that. No one wants to pay lots of money for something that is low quality, but we are talking about cheap and cheerful here. People who want to be the first to adopt are going to pay the higher price - but money is a hugely limited factor there. These good enough technologies will improve over time thanks to Moore's law, but the mass market doesn't need the best of the best right away. This article talks about how Apple actually lost market share in China to cheap and cheerful phones.
To be fair though, mobile technologies like iPhones are game changers in this area. You can now shoot (and edit) 4K on your phone, your point and shoot camera is in your back pocket. You can access Google drive from your phone, make skype calls from your phone, watch Netflix or Hulu, listen to music, even read books from your phone. Everything is now on mobile. And it's the same principle. No the screen might not be the biggest or the best to watch movies on but I always have my phone and 90% of the time I have a strong enough internet connection to watch something if I want to. Same thing for shooting video. I might not have the funds to buy myself a nice video camera, but I can still make a video about my trip to where ever that looks pretty darn good. It lowers those barriers to entry. So while the phone itself might not be cheap, it gives access to lots of these good enough technologies.