The Principle of Good Enough

I worry that I’m often seen as too willing to compromise on projects,

saying “Ship it! It’s good enough!” This might seem like a tendency

toward the mediocre, but it’s not. Sometimes, good enough is just

that, and we can make it better tomorrow. Doc Searls, with credit to David Sifry refers to this as

POGE: The Principle of Good Enough.

“Without POGE we would have no TCP/IP, no HTTP, no HTML, no SMTP. In

other words, no Net, no Web, no Net-based email. POGE also accounts

for the success of XML and Linux. It’s why XML-RPC moved faster than

SOAP."

Later, he says:

“One advantage of POGE is gradual improvement. From their beginnings,

all members of the LAMP suite (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Python,

Perl, PostgreSQL) have been triumphantly adequate efforts."

I think I could accept “Triumphantly adequate,” were it just a step

along the way to something better.