The age of quality

20,000 songs on your iPod. Fifty inch flatscreens. Ten billion web pages indexed by search engines. Ten megapixel pocket cameras. Impressive technical developments have given us impressive metrics.

As we watch our big screens and enjoy playlists that loop every 50 days, I suspect our infatuation with quantity will wane. The next wave will be about quality. The challenge for the market place is that quality is largely non-quantifiable, highly individual and subjective - and often not directly communicable. In such a world, businesses are facing an uphill battle for the hearts and minds of consumers while open initiatives have a head start.

A small aspect of quality may be quantifiable. The bit rate of mp3 music files is one example. But in the new age of quality, expect to see a surging interest in lossless audio formats, supported by the decreasing cost of storage and faster internet connections. The same two factors will also drive us towards lossless compression for photos.

Inherent quality is only weakly linked to quality in a manufacturing sense and the ambition of achieving less than 3.4 defects for every million opportunities. It is strongly linked to innovation and knowing what your customers want. It is linked to social networks because the people we trust are the first ones we turn to for recommendations when we have understood the quantifiable aspects of something. It is linked to collaboration tools because the right working environment makes us more effective.

Even then, we may collide with the non-communicable aspects of quality. Robert M. Pirsig taught us that while quality cannot be defined, we know it when we see it. Open standards, open products and open systems that can be modified and improved upon by users and consumers (i.e., ourselves) will win favour in our quest for quality and pursuit of happiness. Transforming our environment and experiences to what we want without impeding the rights of others means a preference for stuff where those rights are compatible with our creativity.

A search on Google for quality produces more than a billion results. The quantity aspect is certainly impressive. If I was looking for the Australian government's reef water quality protection plan I would find it on page 99.

Tags: quality open standards social networks Google search mp3 lossless audio