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.
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.
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?
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…
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.
Let no one be surprised if, in speaking of entirely new principalities as I shall do, I adduce the highest examples both of prince and of state; because men, walking almost always in paths beaten by others, and following by imitation their deeds, are yet unable to keep entirely to the ways of others or attain to the power of those they imitate. A wise man ought always to follow the paths beaten by great men, and to imitate those who have been supreme, so that if his ability does not equal theirs, at least it will savour of it. Let him act like the clever archers who, designing to hit the mark which yet appears too far distant, and knowing the limits to which the strength of their bow attains, take aim much higher than the mark, not to reach by their strength or arrow to so great a height, but to be able with the aid of so high an aim to hit the mark they wish to reach.
Many people think that “good enough” is better than “perfect”, because you can deliver the good enough product in time and budget, and no-one comes after you demanding a perfect product. So you might think that “good enough” is worse than “perfect” so worse would be better. But that is wrong, because perfect is better than good enough, if you ask me. If someone delivered better than your good enough also perhaps at the same price or cheaper, then you would loose many customers. So in the end being able to deliver a perfect product in time and budget is the ultimate goal. We can limitlessly approach perfection as a affordable solution.
What Steve was saying is that we don’t really understand what it takes to be great. When it does happen it’s easy. Some can be great more often than others perhaps, but anybody can be great sometimes. (At least once maybe.) But if you’re only great say for example, less than half the time, you may not enjoy a long career.
But we can understand what it takes to be good. We can practice our art, we can develop dependable technique so that we can be consistently good, any time, any place. But this is what’s hard to do. It’s also what allows us to stay in the game and have more chances to roll the dice for the possibility to experience greatness. (I also think that knowing you can be consistently good might give you the confidence to take an occasional chance, maybe unconsciously, to “go for it”.)
This is entirely different than saying that we should only aim to be “just good enough”.