Robin's Hood

I have been advocating Good Enough technology for ages. I think it is the underlying principle of the so called 'mashup'. I have managed several projects during the last two years which come under this banner. They provide tremendous value to the users, they are agile (ie. quick to get online), and they make heavy use of open source software.

If you want to know if you are going in the right direction then just try the sneer test. Every time I do one of these projects I am:

1. sneered at by the IT community
2. applauded by the user community.

Can you see the pattern emerging?

Commentary: Why "Good Enough" Is Good Enough: "Say you have a crucial conference call in an hour and your phone goes dead. What do you do? A generation ago, this wasn't much of an issue, at least in the U.S. Phones in the days of the Bell monopoly were engineered to be 'mission critical.' You picked up one of those heavy receivers back then, and the dial tone was as prompt and reliable as water from the tap. It worked."

CNET Commentary by Matt Asay
I stumbled across this excellent commentary from Stephen Baker in BusinessWeek on "good enough" technology. It's actually a great foil to an earlier post I wrote on Software as a Service (SaaS).