In a commentary for the Pew Internet & American Life project, Susannah Fox writes that she's "struck by a phrase repeated a few times: 'good enough' technology."
The phrase actually is a key to understanding disruptive innovation as laid out by Harvard prof Clayton Christensen, and embodied in the NewspaperNext Blueprint for Change.
Truly disruptive technologies tend to enter the environment at the low end, not the high end.
To incumbents, they may at first appear to be a joke. Two examples from the world of database technology serve as examples.
The first is MySQL, a free relational database server that began as a fairly primitive tool.
"Real" database administrators -- the guys with Oracle DBA certifications -- sneered at it. A toy fit only for amateurs, it nevertheless was "good enough" to enable thousands of new Web-based applications (including the software that runs this blog). As it improved, it climbed the ladder of quality and eventually became the data engine behind Google AdSense, a truly disruptive technology.
The second is SQLite, an even more primitive data store -- it doesn't even have a server! This funny little thing is just a C library that can be compiled into any application. It's not worth a damn if you're running a corporate data center, yet it might be "good enough" for some completely new applications where a relational data store was never possible or practical. In Christensen terminology, this is "competing against nonconsumption." It's the tinny little Sony transistor radio in 1955.
So the Mozilla project quietly sticks it into Firefox. And the PHP project quietly sticks it into PHP5. And now Google has used it to create Google Gears, a technology platform that will spawn a whole new breed of Web-based applications that work offline just like they do when you're online, and then sync your data when you reconnect.
This is world-changing stuff. And it begins not by building the high-end, be-all, end-all super-performing solution to all possible problems, but rather at the low end. "Good enough" to solve one new problem at a time.