Good Enough Isn't

摘要

Business gurus love to apply the "80-20 rule" to anything and everything. You know the mantra: 20% of your customers deliver 80% of your profits; 20% of programming code produces 80% of a program's functions; 20% of your employees do 80% of the work. The personal technology industry often takes this concept to a perverse extreme. Since it takes four times as long to finish the last 20% of the job as it does to do the easy stuff, why not get a jump on competitors' shipping schedules by stopping at okay instead of striving for perfection? That philosophy has worked wonders for Microsoft, whose longtime customers used to wait for products' third editions, but have come to realize that bug fixes never stop. Of course, monopolies don't have to worry much about competing on quality.