Approaching Good Enough

There's an interesting story on MacCentral [via iPoding] about a radio station in New York which uses an iPod as a backup audio source when their main satellite link goes down. This is representative of a key trend in start-up land. In the past year, we've been seeing a number of start-ups which are buying commodity hard drives and generic PC parts and building storage boxes to compete with the higher end EMC and NetApp solutions. And needless to say, Microsoft has always been great at owning the low end of the technology curve and waiting until it catches up with the high end.

As the low end of any technology gets better and better, it eventually hits "good enough" and then that aspect of the technology no longer becomes a significant differentiating factor. Remember when you used to buy a cell phone based on battery life? At this point, every cell phone lasts long enough that you just don't have to make a purchase decision based on it. I'm talking about the normal, mass user of course... there's always a small set of power users who are going to care. But once an aspect of technology hits the good enough point, it moves out of the technology realm and into fashion. Which is clearly where cell phones are right now.

When a radio station can use a sub $500 portable MP3 player as a back-up audio source, it's hard to argue that we're not approaching a major good enough point on a whole new class of devices. Local wireless networking isn't quite there yet for devices smaller than laptops (mostly because of battery life issues). But that is really the only factor left before the entire portable-PDA-MP3 sector moves into the realm of fashion. We're very close.