Low fidelty

PRNewsFoto/Pure Digital Technologies, Inc./NewsCom

Robert Capps, writing in Wired, identifies a revolution that began with technology but is changing the way other industries, including law and medicine, are doing business. Capps calls it the "Good Enough Revolution" and uses the Flip video camera to illustrate his point. Traditional video cameras emphasized image quality and features. A new company, Pure Digital, came along and saw a market for a low-cost video camera that was easy to use and produced video that was easy to share online. It sacrificed image quality for ease of use. The Flip Ultra is now the best-selling video camera and controls 17 percent of the market.

Capps writes: "We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect." He uses the MP3 as another example. The music industry apparently laughed when the format was introduced because the sound quality was so much worse than CD. But consumers prized the MP3 because it "let us listen to, manage, and manipulate tracks on our PCs, carry thousands of songs in our pockets, purchase songs from our living rooms, and share tracks with friends and even strangers. And as it turned out, those benefits actually mattered a lot more to music lovers than the single measure of quality we had previously applied to recorded music—fidelity."