From The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine (Wired)
There comes a point at which improving upon the thing that was important in the past is a bad move,” Shirky said in a recent interview. “It’s actually feeding competitive advantage to outsiders by not recognizing the value of other qualit ies.” In other words, companies that focus on traditional measures of quality—fidelity, resolution, features—can become myopic and fail to address other, now essential attributes like convenience and shareability. And that means someone else can come along and drink their milk shake.
Here’s the Recessy bit on healthcare:
In the case of health care, the Good Enough mindset can be seen in a new initiative by Kaiser Permanente. The largest not-for-profit medical organization in the country, Kaiser has long relied on a simple strategy of building complete, self-sustaining hospitals—employing 50 doctors or more—in each region it serves…
…Kaiser has become one of the most technologically advanced health care providers in the country, digitizing everything from patient records and doctors’ notes to lab data and prescriptions and putting it all online. The system is networked, so patients can email their doctor, check lab results, and make appointments from their PC or mobile Web device. Getting a referral doesn’t mean carrying medical records from one doctor to another, as it does at many hospitals.
In 2007 [Kaiser] wondered what would happen if, instead of building a hospital in a new area, Kaiser just leased space in a strip mall, set up a high tech office, and hired two doctors to staff it. Thanks to the digitization of records, patients could go to this “microclinic” for most of their needs and seamlessly transition to a hospital farther away when necessary. …They cut everything they could out of the clinics: no pharmacy, no radiology. They even explored cutting the receptionist in favor of an ATM-like kiosk where patients would check in with their Kaiser card.
What they found is that the system performed very well. Two doctors working out of a microclinic could meet 80 percent of a typical patient’s needs. With a hi-def video conferencing add-on, members could even link to a nearby hospital for a quick consult with a specialist. Patients would still need to travel to a full-size facility for major trauma, surgery, or access to expensive diagnostic equipment, but those are situations that arise infrequently.
A response from Techdirt, “It’s Not The ‘Good Enough’ Revolution; It’s Recognizing What The Consumer Really Wants,” which misses the point: of course the companies profiled in the article are just looking for product/market fit. If “worse is better” resulted in products customers didn’t want, the company would change strategies or the market would weed them out. In many cases, worse is worse. There are always tradeoffs – price, weight, efficiency, user experience, etc. By narrowly focusing on providing just what customers need and discarding the rest, a company embracing Good Enough can release more efficient and lower-cost products that mean something, not just a list of features compromised to leaden mediocrity.