Osborne is on the right
Reading Steve Jobs‘ biography, I came across this quote and thanks to Google, this backstory…
“Adequacy is sufficient. All else is superfluous.”
In 1980, at the West Coast Computer Faire, Adam recruited populist computer designer Lee Felsenstein with a promise calculated to push Lee’s buttons: Adam wanted him to build a kind of “Volkscomputer”—portable, inexpensive, and easy to use. Before long, Adam had launched the company, delivered the computer, and incidentally hired three of my best friends.
Thom Hogan was one of them, and he tells a story one hears repeatedly. “He made six or seven offers. I finally realized that he wasn’t going to take no for an answer.” Lee Felsenstein characterized Adam as the kind of leader people would follow off the edge of a cliff. Georgette Psaris, who worked more closely with Adam than anyone else, vividly recalls her first interview with him. “He was extraordinarily charismatic,” she told me. Slipping unconsciously between present and past tense, she explained, “when he feels that someone doesn’t get something, the whole dam of his charisma opens up. His passion was contagious; and if he felt he could trust you, you had unrestrained freedom.” “Adam was Don Juan,” Thom summarizes, “the great seducer.” But he could also cut you down if you fell out of favor.
These were the last weeks of innocence of the personal computer market. The hobbyists who had made or lost money building the machines that they and their friends wanted were just waiting for the Big Boys—Hewlett-Packard, DEC, and the biggest one of all, Big Blue—to come in and take it all away from them. Some of these hobbyist entrepreneurs were not waiting: While Adam was recruiting Lee Felsenstein, Bill Gates was being recruited by IBM—or vice versa.
In this portentous atmosphere, Adam released his Volkscomputer, and it sold like crazy. Once again, Adam had read the consumer right. The bundling of all the necessary software was a brilliant coup. Not only did it give OCC a big price edge, but it simplified the purchasing process. Alone among computer vendors of the day, Adam understood how important this was to the consumer. As for the software, the programs weren’t necessarily the best available, but they did the job. Adam freely admitted that the machine wasn’t the fastest, the most attractive, or the most expandable computer on the market. But it did what users needed. The whole package was—his term—adequate. And that was sufficient.
Me? I agree with Osborne. Sometimes adequacy is sufficient. Even an adequate blogger can become a thought leader if he/she is already a great thinker — the key is using blogging to be found in Google search. You don’t have to invest a lot of money or have a well designed blog — content is king and adequacy in blogging is a good place to start. What do you think?
