Years ago, I had the unfortunate experience to lead a business development team at a start-up in Silicon Valley. Well, that was not the unfortunate part; the unfortunate part was it was a VRML company. For those of you too young to remember, VRML (Virtual Reality Markup Language) was the first attempt by the technology world to bring 3D to life for consumers everywhere.
There were three problems we were facing. Problem number one was the technology at the time struggled to keep up with us. These were the days of Pentium 90 chips and 9600-baud modems. We were trying to cram gobs of glorious 3D information down that tiny connection, only to have the processor keel over and die when it tried to crunch all that data in time to give us the frame rate we needed. It was not a pretty sight.
The second problem was a typical Silicon Valley song and dance. Venture investors tend to move in herds. They are always looking over each other’s shoulders and trying to decide if they should jump into a new market before one of their limited partners hears at the bar that every other VC is already in it. So one day there were three VRML companies racing each other to get to market. The next day it seemed like there were a hundred of them. We were fighting over the same content companies, the same engineers, and the same strategic partnerships.
However, these first two problems were child’s play compared to the last problem. It was a problem that every new generation of technology faces. And all this popped back into my head during Microsoft’s Windows 10 announcement last week. Yes, they have a new interface, and they are getting better at integrating their desktop and mobile platforms. There were the usual incremental improvements, and actually some really interesting new functionality.
And all anyone could talk about was those glasses. Yes, as part of their announcement, Microsoft is now in the virtual reality game. They launched their HoloLens headset, and spent a large portion of the launch showing off all the cool things they could do. This was on the heels of CES earlier this month, where Oculus had an enormous booth fronting the gaming area of the South Hall (and answering the question of how they were spending all those Facebook billions).
Mind you, both the booth, and HoloLens launch were damn impressive, with more than enough eye candy to go around. And the industry is falling over itself trying to figure out all the ways that these devices are going to disrupt the world around us. One article even breathlessly announced that 3D glasses would make televisions obsolete.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that third problem, didn’t I? And this would be a good time to mention it. As much as technology, the market, and your competitors are all potential speed bumps towards your inevitable world domination, the real problem is this: good enough.
Good enough. I know here in the cradle of technology this seems absurd, but trust me, this is a problem. Sure 3D on the web can be wonderful, but what exactly is it that it does better than good old HTML? Trust me, we spent endless meetings trying to figure this out. Sports, finance, shopping, chat, and even more fell under our gaze. And more often than not, the consumer responded with…eh, what I got is good enough.
Years later I ran marketing for a marketing software company. We were one of the first ones out there, and every time we lost a pitch to a big agency, the winner was not one of our marketing automation competitors. It was good old Excel. The client team leaders would admit Excel was terrible, caused problems left and right, and was entirely unsuited to the task of media planning. But, hey it’s good enough.
It’s the promise of the promised land. If you built the greatest product, people will flock to it without hesitation. But there is hesitation. There is the time your company has spent learning how to use the current solution. There is the money that has already been invested in that solution. And there is the inbred resistance to change that breeds caution come decision time. So next time you are getting ready to launch your next great thing, and after you have researched the market, the competitors, the retail environment and the market drivers, ask yourself the following: what about good enough? It may just be good enough to keep you from the promised bland.
By Christopher Caen
Advertisement
