The Good Enough Revolution

Interesting article in Sept WIRED magazine:  The Good Enough Revolution

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/magazine/17-09/ff_goodenough

Some key quotes:

    .... what consumers want from the products and services they buy is fundamentally changing. 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. These changes run so deep and wide, they're actually altering what we mean when we describe a product as "high-quality."

   ... New York University new-media studies professor Clay Shirky had a mantra to offer the assembled producers and editors: "Don't believe the myth of quality."

 ... To reinforce his point, he pointed to the MP3. The music industry initially laughed off the format, he explained, because compared with the CD it sounded terrible. What record labels and retailers failed to recognize was that although MP3 provided relatively low audio quality, it had a number of offsetting positive qualities

    ... To a degree, the MP3 follows the classic pattern of a disruptive technology, as outlined by Clayton Christensen in his 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma. Disruptive technologies, Christensen explains, often enter at the bottom of the market, where they are ignored by established players. These technologies then grow in power and sophistication to the point where they eclipse the old systems.  That is certainly part of what happens with Good Enough tech: MP3s entered at the bottom of the market, were ignored, and then turned the music business upside down.

    ... a clear pattern emerges. The attributes that now matter most all fall under the rubric of accessibility. Thanks to the speed and connectivity of the digital age, we've stopped fussing over pixel counts, sample rates, and feature lists. Instead, we're now focused on three things: ease of use, continuous availability, and low price. Is it simple to get what we want out of the technology? Is it available everywhere, all the time—or as close to that ideal as possible? And is it so cheap that we don't have to think about price? Products that benefit from the MP3 effect capitalize on one or more of these qualities. And they'll happily sacrifice power and features to do so.

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Apply these concepts to higher ed.  Higher ed has resisted (or very slowly adopted) ease of use, continuous availability, and low prices.  Higher ed has instead emphasized exclusiveness and quality.  What happens when the marketplace finds "good enough" education elsewhere that's easier to use, continuously available, and at a much lower cost?  And finds "quality" to be over-rated?

Higher ed is ripe to be picked off by disruptive alternatives entering the bottom of the market.  It seems this article makes a very hard-to-counter argument.