Sorry Seth, the Public decides

On Tuesday, Seth Godin posted an article entitled, "The Seduction of 'Good Enough' ".

Here is an excerpt from the article:

But is anything as good as it could be?

Maybe a cup of Starbucks coffee or a Scharffenberger chocolate bar. But almost everything else needs a lot of work.

That canoe could be half the weight. There's no reason to wait an hour to get on an airplane. Software development should be twice as fast at half the cost.

And what's with the layout of this keyboard? They came up with a keyboard a century ago, decided it was good enough and then stopped!

Seth fails to realize that building a better mousetrap does not mean that the public will BUY the better mousetrap. And if the public refuses to pay for the better mousetrap then manufacturers will give the public what they want.

When videotape came out, the betamax format was technologically superior to the VHS format. Many professional videographers still use betamax - but the retail public would not support betamax, so now it is only available at a high premium price.

When Unisys produced the first random access computer storage system, they beat IBM to business computer production by about a year. But IBM created a computer that relied on pieces of paper with holes punced in them and instead of going with the magnetic storage which was much superior to pieces of paper, CEOs bought punchcard computers.

When the first personal computers came out in 1975-76, they beat IBM to the personal computer market by 5 to 6 years. The command set on the processor chip in the Apple II+ could process higher mathematical algorithms at about 4 times the speed of the Intel chip in the original IBM-PC. However, the IBM sales force did not try to sell to geeks and those who were computer literate but rather to CEOs and CFOs who at that time knew almost nothing about computer technology.

(Seth, IBM's marketers in the 1980s relied on storytelling and not on tech specs.)

Today, most professional web designers will tell you that the small business owners are uninterested in efficient websites, they are primarily interested in inexpensive websites. In 2004, some of the larger corporations began to grasp the advantages of W3C compliance and CSS designed layouts. However, the vast majority of websites still use table formatting and obsolete HTML code and are extremely inefficient.

Why?

Because the business owners do not want to spend the money to get a great website, they want to get a cheap website.

Why do you think that low quality, throwaway merchandise is ubiquitous?

It is because the buying public would rather buy a $5 watch which will fall apart in a year or so than buy a pricier watch with a 10 year warranty.

Recently Frontline had a documentary entitled, "Is Wal-Mart good for America?" It focused on the way that Walmart has moved most of its procurement overseas. But the true story is that Wal-Mart's stocks almost tanked because the buying public was more interested in cheaper and cheaper and cheaper than in Sam Walton's original philosophy. Originally, Sam Walton was focused on Customer Satisfaction and Quality.

But, the buying public was not. And Wal-Mart's stock plummetted. The decision to buy most of their product overseas was made in order to avoid bankruptcy.

Just as it is true that democracies tend to end up with Mediocre Leaders, free markets eventually end up giving the public what it demands.

The Apostle Paul wrote Timothy "For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine but according to their own desires, having itching ears, they shall heap up to themselves teachers and shall turn away their ears from the truth and shall be turned to fables.

Seth, The time will come when the buying public will not pay for quality but according to their own selfishness, trying to save a nickel here and there, they shall heap up to themselves discounters and shall turn away their wallets from QUALITY and shall be turned to commodities.