Blog > June 2008

Seth Godin wrote a moving post yesterday about worthiness. He writes almost as a stream of consciousness and makes some great points.

I like the last one best

“The object isn’t to be perfect. The goal isn’t to hold back until you’ve created something beyond reproach. I believe the opposite is true. Our birthright is to fail and to fail often, but to fail in search of something bigger than we can imagine. To do anything else is to waste it all.”

Which leads to the question how good is good enough. How quickly should you release. In particular, this applies nicely to software. How many bugs are acceptable before making a release? Or what level of bug is acceptable to let through?

These are tough questions. I am often told that software companies don’t get their stuff ‘out there’ quickly enough. They wait too long and miss the moment. But then I think of something like the iphone which entered a crowded market years after the first guys launched and have now sold more than 6 million phones. Or Google which came late and killed the incumbents. These examples point to quality being the most important factor not timeliness. But in reality it has to be both. The longer you leave it, the better you have to be in order to be good enough to make an impact. iPhone was just very very good, as was Google.