David Fredh : Blog and Pictures

What is good enough? According to Wikipedia it is a rule for software design. According to the writer on wikipedia:

Once the quick-and-simple design is deployed,
it can then evolve as needed,
driven by user requirements

I think good enough market segments are kind of new but they are easy to find if you look for them. When it comes to technology during the 90′s, the market was mainly focused on 2 segments: good or cheap.

For every “good enough” product there will always be a small group that wants a high fidelity version. All the big volumes will be in the good enough segments and the high fidelity versions will be expensive and targeted for small groups. In the same time it will be a big market for “a bit better than good enough” targeted for people that wants a little extra. This means that you will create 3 markets from just one! This fragmentation will go on and on and on. Then you have a market that is more fragmented than ever with: cheap, cheap but a bit better, good enough, good enough but a bit better, cheap almost high fidelity and high fidelity. At some point you will have too many “small segments” between good and high end and finally some markets segments will disappear.

What if the high fidelity buyers will find benefits in the lower price segments?
When reading the wired-article “The good enough revolution, when cheap and simple is just fine” I noticed that sometimes you can create other values in the good enough segments that you cannot in the high fidelity range. A couple of examples:

Mobile cameras – always with you.
TheFlip video camcorder – cheap and easy to use.
Youtube – Free with lots of content.
Netbooks – Cheap and small.
IKEA – Why pay more?
Skype – Free and border-less.

When it comes to music you can store more compressed music in one device. Compressed formats also allow streaming and infinite music for a monthly fee. That kind of services and possibilities is not available for lossless formats for the moment..

Music, one market where good enough probably will out compete high end.
Let’s compare the music industry from the 90′s with today’s “good enough” music market. On the 90′s we had CDs. The industry was focusing on quality and Digital Remastered versions of the old LP-versions. Quality and convenience was the sales arguments for the CD.

When the mp3-format arrived during the mid 90-s it was a revolution. It had a good quality compared to the other digital formats and was possible to download even with a 56k modem. With services like Kazaa and Napster people started to download music (mp3 files with 128kbit). People got used to and accepted the quality decrease since they got the music for free and it was more convenient than buying a cd. The noticable quality decrease that you got with 128kbit mp3 was ok, since it was… yeah… good enough…

With Itunes Music Store the digital music went legal, but the sound quality was only 128kbit/s AAC. That was quite far from CD quality. Even if people where paying money for the music, they still recieved quite bad sound quality. Why did we accept to pay for bad sound quality? Probably because it was good enough for some. Around 2 years ago Apple increased the quality to 256kbit/s AAC VBR that sounds alot better. For the most of us, it is good enough.

The Spotify music streaming service uses OGG 160kbit/s compression in their music archive. Their OGG settings has some really disturbing differences compared to uncompressed music when it comes to cymbals and intensive parts that starts suddenly directly after a silent part, but for many people it is good enough. For premium users Spotify gives the possibility to listen to the music with a 320kbit/s compression mode that sounds very good. It is hard to tell the difference compared to the uncompressed original, it is good enough to even more people.

I think it is a big difference between compressed and lossless audio. A cd or FLAC (lossless audio) file sounds a bit more natural and not so “tense” as compressed music. For me the difference is worth paying for. I think I’m heading closer to the high fidelity group when it comes to music.

According to Wikipeida, good enough is an adapting process.. . It will be improved when it needs to (when it’s not good enough any more)… For every improvement it will be a bigger threat to high fidelity (or better quality). It will attract more and more customers. At some point the number of high fidelity customers will be too low. What will happen? It will become a very expensive niche or the product will disappear. I am wondering what will happen with the CD in a couple of years?