Essay
The age of almost good enough
Products do not need to become the best to transform a market. They only need to cross the threshold customers will accept.
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01
Unacceptable
The core function still fails the customer's real task.
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02
Good enough
Cheap competence crosses the adoption threshold.
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03
Beyond quality
Trust, brand, distribution, service, and taste decide.
Once the basic function crosses the acceptable threshold, competition moves somewhere else.
Markets move at thresholds
Engineers compare quality continuously: one model is eight percent better, one camera has more resolution, one watch keeps more accurate time. Customers often behave discontinuously. Below a threshold, the product is unacceptable. Above it, additional quality matters much less.
AI is pushing many kinds of work across this line at once. A support email needs clarity, not literary greatness. A product description needs to explain the product. A routine translation needs to preserve enough meaning for the task. For much of this work, AI is not perfect. It is already almost good enough.
The middle gets compressed
Imagine three levels: cheap and poor, competent and normal, exceptional and expensive. Technology often attacks the middle. When machines produce competent work cheaply, the normal provider loses differentiation. Exceptional expertise remains valuable; merely adequate production becomes a commodity.
Premium pricing can collapse before experts disappear. If AI produces eighty percent of a competitor report in minutes, the analyst must explain why the final twenty percent is worth the fee. The answer cannot simply be more pages. It must be interpretation, accountability, access, judgment, or proprietary evidence.
Customers notice new signals
When every website is polished, polish stops signaling quality. When every email has perfect grammar, grammar stops signaling care. When every startup can generate features and an investor deck, feature count and presentation say less.
Customers begin asking different questions: does this company understand me? Can I trust it? Does the product fit my real workflow? Will someone handle the exceptional case? Is the brand meaningful to people like me? The competition moves above the quality floor.
Map the boundary
Good enough is different in every industry. A mistake in a social image is reversible; a mistake in medical, legal, or physical systems may not be. AI adoption moves fastest where checking is cheap and failure can be undone.
The opportunity often sits just above the threshold: verification around generated code, human handling for unusual support cases, certification for high-risk translation, or taste that connects marketing assets to real customer insight. Most industries do not disappear. Their scarcity moves.