in defense of Steve Martin’s absolutely atrocious presence in films over the lest decade or so, let me assert this: He doesn’t care – he just wants the paycheck.
I’d say his recent big movie hits have been uninspiring, but I don’t think it’s fair to lump it in as all crap. For every “Cheaper By the Dozen 2” or “Pink Panther” there’s something decent to balance out the porfolio, like “The Spanish Prisoner” or “Bowfinger”.
The flaw in this article is obvious.
Steve Martin is not funny.
The lesson here can be carried over in so many things in life. Sometimes it’s best to complete the task at hand even it it is just “good” then to be unfinished striving for “great”.
Can we even define what GOOD really is?
For me, greatness is harder to quantify than merely good because there are so many gradations and so many different ways of judging greatness. Good, on the other hand, only has to be more worthwhile than the crushing weight of mediocrity and truly, painfully, horribly bad things all around us.
I live in Pennsylvania. I don’t need to be a great programmer, just better than the Amish.
So, what Robert said.
“The heights of great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but that while their companions slept were toiling upward in the night.” - Gary Player.
He also said, “The more I practice the luckier I get.”
OK, so he’s not saying that worse is better, just that you need to work hard to achieve your goals. I think that’s what Steve Martin means when he says “What was hard was to be good, consistently good, night after night, no matter what the circumstances.”
I think that the dominance of Microsoft Windows over Apple Macintosh is another example of “worse is better”, although I prefer to restate the axiom as “good enough is better” in this case. The Apple Macintosh had a superior graphical interface way back in 1984. It wasn’t until version 3.x did the Windows interface even approach that of the Macintosh (though Microsoft was also working on OS/2 for IBM at the time). Despite Windows’ inferiority to other graphical OS’s, namely Macintosh, Microsoft dominated and continues to dominate the desktop market largely because they targeted a broad market and their products are at least adequate for the majority of the people in that market, but aren’t neccessarily the “best” available.
…seems to be true with operating systems ? ( sorry 
)
Not sure I fully understand it. Maybe LISP is better then C++ in some areas, but I am sure C++ is better in other areas and because of that is “wins” ?
I think Steve Martin should worry more about making people have fun then being great.
The point isn’t that lower quality is superior to high quality–the WWII aircraft and operating system examples demonstrate other things. They describe the powers of, respectively, interfaces (I’m no expert, but ThatGuyInTheBack might be) and marketing strategies.
Worse is better is generally sacrificing perfection for other benefits. In its original use, it referred to the success of C and Unix having a lot to do with their emphasis on simplicity over correctness and completeness.
What Jeff is talking about is about consistency and completeness over correctness. It’s related to Worse is Better, yes, but it’s not quite the same.
the Russians won the air war because their equipment was worse than the Germans.
Not exactly. They won because their interface was better, even though the planes were worse, proving that under some circumstances, good interface can trump good technology.
“It is easy to be great” misses the point slightly. Consider golf. Every now and then a golfer will manage par, or perhaps even a hole in one. But a great golfer will get par more often than an averge one, because they have more innate skill and take it upon themselves to practice much harder. What I think Steve Martin is saying is that doing something lots makes you better at it, and that you shouldn’t think you are great at something just because you did it really well once.
I’ve no idea how this really maps into programming. Sometimes things I’ve dashed off have been loved, and things I’ve laboured over have been hated. My guidance at this point comes from Kipling, and the poem IF :
“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster,
And treat those two impostors just the same”
As long as you are true to yourself, and are happy that what you have done is as good as it needs to be, then the rest is down to things that you probably have no control over anyway - so it is best not to worry about them.
Cruel Shoes… Explained
Carlos has just spent forever showing her ALL the shoes in the store. At this point, the woman is still not happy. So for his own personal amusement, he goes to get the “Cruel Shoes”. He explains what’s wrong with them and she still wants to try them on. He gets to play the sadist, and torture her as she has been torturing him all day. Oddly, she likes the shoes and takes them. Here is the “Women want look good more than feel good” piece.
Next day, the story repeats itself. You think he sold the cruel shoes and no longer has them? Nope, just so happens he has another pair.
Carlos is a Sadist, and this is his way to get back at all those women shopping for shoes… He’s the earliest Al Bundy.
At least, that was my interpretation and why it was funny to me.
WA
Good article. In my opinion, worse is better, until it’s no longer good enough. This threshold is largely an individual metric, but many individuals start feeling the same way around the same time, a sort of Gaussian distribution of public opinion if you will.
Then people start switching from their worse solutions, to “better” ones by the path of least resistance. Java was in the right place at the right time to nab C++ developers for instance. Ruby on Rails, and soon, Python and Django, are in the same boat for those crushed under the burden of J2EE.
Perhaps even Scala and F# will benefit from the increasing complexity of Java and C# respectively. I predict that within the next 5 years, there will be another major market shift to a new language. What will it be?
I like to say – and I don’t think it’s original to me;I’m not that great – there are no great men (people), only ordinary men who do great things. And then there is Bill Gates, who did something really bad, but it turned out great for him. Which brings us to the wisdom of Solomon, who said, "time and chance happen to us all."
So, is it better to shoot for the moon and burn up on reentry or just to jump over the water puddle and live to tell about it?
Don said:
“But that is wrong, because perfect is better than good enough”
Only if it actually ships. The “good” product that ships will outsell the “perfect” product that never gets finished.
And Jeff… I’m sorry, but “Bowfinger” was a terrible movie.
A surprisingly deep quote, considering it comes from “Star Trek” (paraphrasing):
“Don’t try to be a great man; just be a man, and let history make its judgement.”
explaining jokes is always a losing proposition… but everyone has to lose sometimes.
Anyway, it has -nothing- to do with a woman being willing to put up with painful shoes if she looks good. It’s nowhere near that straightforward. Jokes don’t always make a pithy observation on reality…
Cruel Shoes is not funny, period.
The ‘better interface’ comment about fighter planes and the ‘better GUI’ comment about OS’s both miss the fundamental point of WorseIsBetter in roughly the same way.
The actual product is worse. E.g., the Russian plane, flown by a competent pilot, will typically lose to the German plane flown by a competent pilot. It’s interface won’t save it in a dogfight. But the worse product is better for the targeted application. How a given thing fits in the real-world context that matters, not the thing itself.
So long as thing X passes the minimum acceptable requirements for things of its class (the plane flies and shoots, the OS runs useful apps), it will beat thing Y IFF the variables outside the scope of things of its class but relevant to how the thing is used in its target human context are in X’s favor.
To finish the example, the context was winning the air war, not making the best plane. The rooskies won the air war because their plane was good enough as a plane, and their solution was better fit to realities external to pure plane quality - namely pilot trainability throughput, pilot turnover, and new pilot availability. The solution-in-context was better, but the plane was not.
It’s mostly about drawing the right-sized box, but allowance must be made for fuzziness of the critical variable definitions - in this case, ‘good enough plane’ and ‘critical pilot turnover rate’.
Another way of looking at it: avoid falling into the trap of thinking that the key tangible component is the only thing that matters, when the thing has to be used in the wild.
Unforunately, this has nothing to do with Steve M’s point about Good v. Great.
PS - Steve Martin really does have mad skilz - check out ‘Picasso at Lapin Agile’ if his popular stuff makes you think otherwise.
"Forget greatness. Can we even define what greatness truly is? "
Can we even define what GOOD really is? Maybe I’m missing something, but if you could pick between being consistently good and consistently great, why wouldn’t you want to be great?
I get the idea that long term consistency trumps flash-in-the-pan greatness, but this entry seems a little, I don’t know, cowardly.
Almost like you’re telling us to stay conservative, stick with only what you’re good at, don’t explore the unknown, don’t experiment, don’t dream big, don’t “look at what hasn’t been done and say ‘why not’”, and just be good.