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When good enough isn’t good enough

There’s a great article in a recent edition of the Economist that talks about how modern business is relating to one of the fundamental laws of the IT industry – a law that has been proved consistently over the last half a century: Moore’s Law.

Gordon Moore was a co-founder of Intel and in 1965 he observed that the cost of a given amount of computing power falls by approximately half over a period of 18 months. Another way of interpreting it would be to say that the amount of computing power over that period in effect doubles for the same price.

Things are changing now though, partly because the industry is maturing but primarily because the recession is forcing organisations to closely review the technology they employ and what it achieves for them.

In the past (and in agreement with Moore’s Law whenever we upgraded equipment it did a lot more for us with no price increase. These days it’s becoming increasingly difficult to wring useful additional functionally out of both hard and software upgrades and the costs often aren’t worth the additional bells and whistles. Moore’s Law is being reversed.

As opposed to products that offer ever improving performance at a set price we’re seeing an acceptable level of performance at increasingly reduced prices. Welcome to the age of ‘good enough’ Information Technology. As useful as ‘good enough’ IT can be for organisations looking to leverage more value for money from their investments, the spectre of false economy is lurking in the shadows.

Be warned - especially when it comes to Digital Media and the Internet - any cost cutting that impairs your organisation’s ability to generate Internet profile, and deliver your products and services effectively and profitably could be the difference between corporate life and death.

As far as a progressive and successful Internet strategy is concerned, good enough simply isn’t good enough. Organisations prepared to go the extra mile will enjoy the lions’ share of the benefits, those trying to cut corners on web development, content development, SEO and all the potential that Web 2.0 offers may only have the opportunity to make that error once.