But as an intellectual exercise, suppose for a moment that that was not true; suppose that we were doomed to continue using today’s hardware technology for the next 10 years. Would things get any better?

Those of us who have been working in the software industry for the past 40-50 years are likely to have a pessimistic reaction to such a scenario. “We’ve been writing lousy code, full of bugs, for the past 50 years — and we’ll probably continue to do so for the next 50 years. And we’ve been consistently over-budget and behind-schedule on our software development projects for the past 50 years — so why should we expect things to get any better in the next 50 years?”

Indeed, there is some cause for pessimism here, but there is also an optimistic response: “We have gotten better at project management, and we do write better software than we did 50 years ago. But as hardware technology has improved so astoundingly over the past several decades, business organizations and society, in general, have demanded that we solve bigger and more complex problems. And we have taken on bigger and more complex problems, until we reach the point that our efforts are just barely ‘good enough.’”

We could debate these pessimistic and optimistic perspectives for quite a long time, but for now we’ll put them aside. Back to the simple, straightforward question: what if we could only expect improvements in the computer industry from the “stuff” we do in software?

One thing is fairly obvious: it would take us another 5-10 years just to use the hardware we’ve already got! There are exceptions, of course, some of which we’ve hinted at in some of the previous postings in this blog thread. But particularly in the area of personal/home computers, and also in the area of small-business computers, we are using only a small fraction of the available computing resources. We could probably continue for another 5-10 years, writing the kind of “brute-force” software that lazy programmers have been able to write for the past decade or two; and at some point, we might have to start optimizing our code, and we might have to schedule the use of, and access to, our hardware resources. It would be extremely unpleasant to go back to the days of “batch scheduling” of computer jobs; and it would be unpleasant if we had to abandon the idea of dedicated, personal computing devices, and return to the days when lots of people had to share scarce hardware resources … but it could be done.

Again, let’s put that scenario aside for now. Let’s take a more positive, optimistic perspective: what kind of new, “good” things might we expect from the software industry? There’s one interesting perspective that we’ve been hearing from people for the past year or so: look how many apps are available on the iPhone! First it was 100,000 — which was pretty amazing — and then it was 150,000 and now it seems to be 200,000. Interestingly, I recall reading about numbers like this back in the late 1990s, when the Palm Pilot was all the rage. In a long-forgotten article in the Wall Street Journal (which I’m too lazy to track down on Google), I remember reading that Palm had cultivated a “cottage industry” of 40,000 developers who created tens of thousands of Palm apps, which they sold for a few dollars each. Of course, Palm didn’t have iTunes — and the mechanism for finding, purchasing, downloading, and installing the apps was time-consuming and tedious.

So now that we do have iTunes, does this mean we should expect a Moore’s-Law phenomenon with mobile apps? Will today’s figure of 200,000 apps escalate up to 2 million apps by 2015, and 20 million apps by 2020? Even if that were true (the likelihood of which I’ll discuss in a moment), it doesn’t necessarily mean that society will be fundamentally improved — if we had access to 2 million iPhone apps in 2015, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they would all be “killer apps.” In fact, only a small percentage of them would show up on everyone’s iPhone — but the rest could still serve a useful purpose, in the form of a “long tail” of “niche” apps that are only useful to a few people.

Indeed, the long-tail phenomenon is already quite visible in places like Amazon and the iTunes music store. In the old days, when music was sold on vinyl records, and books were only available on dead trees, retail outlets (e.g., book-stores and record stores) only had room for a limited inventory, and were thus constrained to stock and sell only their most popular items. But now, iTunes carries an inventory of approximately 5 million songs; and in any given fiscal quarter, almost every one of those 5 million songs sells at least one copy. And if it turns out that almost all of those songs sell only one copy, who cares? They’re all just bits on a disk drive, and it doesn’t really matter when you transmit one copy or a million copies to the customers who want them.

So maybe the software-driven future of technology is one in which we benefit from a long-tail phenomenon of millions of individual apps on the various hardware devices we have in our pockets, our purses, our homes, and our offices. But if that is the future, we need to ask: who will actually write all of those apps? People who already consider themselves programmers? Depending on whose estimate you believe, there may be a few million such individuals world-wide today, and if they spent their evenings and weekends working on clever apps (assuming that each of them had a clever idea), maybe that would get us from the current level of 200,000 iPhone apps to a couple million. Beyond that, I have my doubts…

Indeed, if we think that the most interesting version of the future consists of dramatically more application programs, we need to imagine a world in which people other than “professional” programmers could create them. Computer programming is no longer considered “rocket science,” so we don’t have to restrict our attention to people with university computer-science degrees; indeed, they don’t have to have any university degree. Even if we imagined that new apps required basic literacy and the educational equivalent of a high-school diploma, that would still be a very, very large number of people … indeed, perhaps enough to get us to the level of 20 million apps a decade from now.

To illustrate that this is not as crazy as it might sound, consider that until the mid-1970s, almost any kind of non-trivial computation for business, scientific, or engineering purposes required a programmer, who would hand-craft a program in FORTRAN to produce the required computational results. Today, we refer to such a program as a “spreadsheet,” and we refer to the “programmer” who creates it as a “person.” I don’t know how many copies of Excel have been sold by Microsoft, but I’m willing to be that it’s far more than 20 million; and there are many more than 20 million spreadsheets providing useful results.

So perhaps what we’re saying is that software-related technological advances will come from the introduction of a “tool” as simple and powerful as a spreadsheet, with which ordinary people can create whatever app they might imagine for their mobile computing device (or, for that matter, any computing device). Maybe it will be a “mashup” tool, developed along the lines of Yahoo Pipes, or the tools available from Microsoft and IBM and others. Maybe it will be some kind of widget, template, or other mechanism.

I don’t know if this is how the future will turn out, and I can think of one reason why there might be no relationship at all between the world of spreadsheet-developers, and the world of mobile-phone app developers. Consider this: spreadsheets are generally created in order to solve a “real” problem — e.g., because someone wants to add rows and columns of numbers in order to make a business decision. I’m sure there are exceptions, but most of us would not consider a spreadsheet to be “entertainment,” or “fun,” or some kind of “game.”

But if you look at the items in the iTunes App Store, the vast majority are games, fun, or somehow related to entertainment. There are, again, lots of exceptions (I’ve got only one game, Klondike, on my iPhone), and there are lots of apps that provide serious, productive solutions to some kind of problem. But you can’t get away from the fact that most of the apps are for amusement.

Not only that, they’re not for the amusement of the person who created the app. Instead, the app-developer is hoping to persuade others to play his game, and join in the entertainment. If millions of people are thus entertained, and if they’re willing to spend $0.99 to download and play the game, then the developer gets rich. Conversely, if nobody likes the game, or nobody even notices its existence, then the developer makes no money — and is likely to conclude that he wasted his time…

As for the “productive” apps that one finds on a mobile device, a large percentage are simply scaled-down versions of the same app that one already has on a laptop or desktop computer. In any case, though, here are the categories of apps that I think we’ll see a lot more of in the next several years, some of which may well turn out to be as much of a killer app as spreadsheets and Google:

• collaborative apps — it may be the next generation of Facebook, Twitter, and other “social media” apps, or perhaps something like the newly-released Google Wave
• virtual-world apps — most current versions of computer games could be thought of as a “virtual world” in which player(s) battle enemies, search for treasures, etc. But I think these will become far more sophisticated and intricate (e.g., like Second Life, with social rules and currencies), long-lasting, and multi-player in nature. If it can be embedded into your mobile device, with the ability to call, text, or email to you (and from you), it’s easy to imagine that some players could essentially abandon the “real world” altogether.
• more “location-aware” apps — indeed, the collaborative apps, and virtual-world apps, become all the more powerful if they know where they (and their associated human “owner”) are located, as well as knowing where other relevant participants/players are located. Looking at my iPhone, I see that roughly 25% of my apps are not only location-aware, but are able to use that information constructively. I think we’ve only begun to explore this area, because it’s only been the last couple of years that our mobile computing devices have had GPS mechanisms attached. The question to ask here, I think, is not what the “killer app” will be in the location-aware space, but rather who is likely to invent it…
• assistant/agent apps — aside from alarm clocks and simple “filters” that tell us if a designated keyword has been spotted in a newsfeed, most of today’s apps are fairly passive. We have to tell them that we want a task carried out, and we typically have to provide a great deal of specific data in order for the task to be performed. Tomorrow’s apps will gradually accumulate more and more “knowledge” about the humans they’re “connected” to, in terms of likes and dislikes, habits, areas of competence and expertise, short-term vs. long-term goals, willingness to make tradeoffs and compromises, etc. As a result, tomorrow’s apps will be able to take a more active role, offering advice, guidance, companionship, and warnings. Again, I have no idea what the specific “killer app” will be in this area; but it’s the generation of today’s children and teenagers that I think we should be watching for inspiration.

Even if my presentation is utterly boring, there will be free pizza and snacks … but apparently no free beer. Hey, you can’t have everything…

In a desperate attempt to keep my presentation from putting you to sleep within the first 30 seconds, I’m considering doing cartwheels across the room, and perhaps a hand-stand on the lectern. I’ve also included some video clips at unexpected spots in the presentation, which will hopefully draw a few giggles, snorts, and guffaws. And I’ve sent an email invitation to Madonna, asking her to join us for a cameo presentation … but she hasn’t responded thus far.

If you can’t join us in beautiful downtown Bedford for the event, you can download a PDF version of the presentation — though it doesn’t contain the video clips. Don’t complain: if you want the whole package, you gotta be there in person…

To download the 5.21 megabyte PDF file, click on the icon below, or click here.

I’m here in Rome this week, presenting a two-day seminar on  “Managing Death-March Projects” for Technology Transfer Institute. You should be there so you can hear whatever clever jokes may occur to me while I’m presenting my material, as well as the comments and questions from the other participants. But if you’re stuck in some other part of the world, or you couldn’t persuade your boss to send you to Rome, you can click here to download the (17MB) PDF version of the presentation, which has a whole  bunch of embedded links to other presentations, publications, books, articles, websites, etc.

 But after a week of watching a gut-wrenching roller-coaster ride on the New York stock market, and reading various gloom-and-doom predictions of bad economic times ahead, I thought it would be more appropriate to replace that talk with a presentation on “Death-March 3: Software Processes in the New Hard Times”:

If you click on either icon, you’ll download a 12.2-megabyte PDF file that actually contains both presentations. So you can look at either one of them, depending on whether you’re feeling optimistic or pessimistic. Enjoy … or don’t.  

Here’s a summary of the additions, changes, and corrections that I made in V54; for convenience, you’ll also find that they appear in red in the PDF materials, so you can see what has changed since V52 and V53:

1. On page 70, I added Google Maps to the list of Ajax examples.
2. On page 84, I added Google App Engine to the list of interesting products from Google.
3. On page 85, I provided a new (working) link and details about Zimbra.
4. On page 87, I added a link to IBM’s new “Bluehouse” product.
5. On pages 89-90, I added two new pages of details on the iPhone 3g.
6. On page 91, I provided additional details on CIsco’s acquisition of Five Across.
7. On page 132, I added a bullet point with a link to Nicholas Carr’s article on “Is Google Making Us Stupid?“

I probably won’t do any more updates for another week or two, but this should keep you busy for a while. Enjoy…

When a software product (or, more generally, any product) is “bad enough,” we decide not to buy it (or use it) in the first place; or if we’re already using it, then we decide to abandon it in favor of some alternative that is, in our personal opinion, “good enough.” Expressing it in those terms makes an interesting point: some product is judged to be “bad enough” (to avoid or replace) only in comparison to some other product. Unfortunately, we’re sometimes stuck with products we hate, and which drive us crazy on a daily basis, but which we’re forced to continue using because there’s no reasonable alternative. Regardless of which computing platform you use, and which email/Web-browser/word-processor you use, I’m sure you can think of appropriate examples in your own little world.

I think the best example, for most of us, of a “bad enough” software product that we choose to ignore altogether, in favor of the manual, or “non-automated” alternative, is the latest-and-greatest “personal information manager,” or PIM. Anyone who is sufficiently computer-literate to be reading this blog probably has some computerized form of a calendar, address list, and to-do list; but many of the products we use are pretty primitive and frustrating. Indeed, they barely — just barely — qualify as “good enough”; the problem is that the latest products from some tiny startup company, or any one of the large behemoth software giants, turn out to be even worse. Why should I spend 10 minutes typing in all of the details about a new appointment, or a new to-do item, if the chances of my ever needing that information is one in a million? A Luddite might prefer to continue using his/her Filofax or paper-calendar system; and most of us semi-automated folks will continue to use whatever semi-automated tool we first started using five or ten years ago.

This raises another interesting point: sometimes the new software product (e.g., a PIM that promises to organize our day-to-day lives in an “effortless” fashion) is not really bad at all; but it’s not so much better than its benefits compensate for the inertia associated with our old product. For example: I’ve been using a calendar/address product called “Now Up To Date” and “Now Contact” since 1993, and I’m really getting sick of it. But it only crashes five times a day, and it contains every detail of my personal schedule since 1993, and it’s networked with my wife’s calendar, and it allows me to schedule time in 5-minute increments. Any of the newer products — e.g., Apple’s iCal, Google’s Calendar, or the forthcoming Entourage product in Office 2008 — suffers either from the fact that it’s only incrementally/marginally better than what I’ve got, or the enormous headache of converting 15 years of legacy data. Thus far, it’s just not worth it.

But I think there are several software companies — Microsoft being the most egregious example, but Apple being only marginally better — that assume that just because they could get away with “bad enough”products (because it was so painful to switch) up until now, they can continue do so for the foreseeable future. Most veteran computer users won’t abandon a “bad enough” product casually just to get a 5% improvement (in cost, productivity, ease of use, etc.); but technology changes rapidly enough that it’s only a matter of time before a new startup comes along with a product that may be (a) buggy, (b) expensive, (c) poorly documented, but (d) 10 times better than the crap we’re currently using. And while corporate IT departments may feel some kind of political loyalty to IBM or Microsoft or whatever vendor they’ve been using, I suspect most consumer-oriented computer users have much less loyalty.

I’ve got a long list of “bad enough”software that I’d love to get rid of. I won’t bother enumerating the products on that list, simply because your list may be different. But I think it’s a worthwhile exercise to create such a list; and it’s worth reviewing that list at least once every six months…

Krigsman has 304 “followers” on his Twitter network, and I have no idea how many of them saw this particular tweet of his (one of the 1,780 tweets he has posted, as of 5:15 this afternoon), or paid any attention to it. As for me: I’ve turned off the audible bluebird sound that chirps each time a tweet arrives (it was driving my dog absolutely crazy), so I don’t always focus carefully on the stream of tweets that scroll down a narrow window on the left side of my computer monitor. But I happened to spot the “not good enough!” tweet, and I immediately posted a smart-aleck response suggesting that he was wrong, wrong, wrong on this point. That led to a snarky reply from Krigsman, and the debate was on …

After a dozen reasonably polite, good-natured tweets, we both agreed that it was extremely difficult to establish a meaningful dialogue when our messages were constrained by Twitter to 140 characters. True, it does lead to more succinct conversations (e.g., the first three paragraphs of this blog posting could probably be deleted without anyone even noticing!), but for anything other than the typical tweets of “hey, take a look at this cool web site!” or “does anyone know how to reinstall Vista in less than 16 hours of frustrating work?”, Twitter is really not the ideal communications medium. So Krigsman and I agreed to continue our debate on our respective blogs, and I volunteered to make the opening statement. Here goes:

Background: If you’re already using Twitter, or if you know what it’s all about, feel free to skip this paragraph. But if it’s new to you, take a look at my recent blog postings, “Phooey! Twitter is NOT dangerous!” and “Twitter troops, Twitter armies, but no Twitter mobs — the essence of Twitter etiquette” for background information.

More background: I work as an independent consultant, so by definition, the roughly 100 people in my Twitter network (i.e., my “followers”) are not part of my “enterprise.” I think the same is true for Krigsman, and it seems to be true of all the other Twitterers whose tweets scroll steadily down my computer screen. But Krigsman specifically asserted that Twitter is not good enough to be used in the “Enterprise” — by which I assume he means reasonably large organizations, perhaps on the scale of General Motors or the U.S. Defense Department. The very notion of serious, hard-working business people “tweeting” at each other may strike some (including some veteran Twitterers!) as highly unlikely, but it’s important to note that such a scenario is being discussed. For examples, take a look at several recent posts by the CIO of British Telecom’s Global Services unit, JP Rangaswami: “A sideways look at Twitter in the Enterprise,” “More on Twitter in the Enterprise: Susan Reynolds and PEAple,” “Continuing with the theme of Twitter in the Enterprise: Twitter and Agile,” and “Thinking about Push and Pull and Twitter in the Enterprise.”

Even more background: “Good enough” may sounds like a casual phrase, but I devoted a whole chapter to it in my 1996 book, Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer. Wikipedia provides a slightly different explanation in an article entitled “Principle of Good Enough” (not to be confused with the 16 different songs called “Good Enough,” or the song called “Good Enough is Good Enough,” which you can read about on Wikipedia’s disambiguation page), and it claims that “Ethernet, the Internet protocol and the World Wide Web are good examples of this kind of design.” To me, “good enough software” means a software system or product that exhibits a combination of price, features/functions, performance (CPU speed, memory, etc.), reliability/security/availability/stability, ease of use, and (schedule) availability that is … well, good enough … to satisfy the needs of some collection of potential users. When my Rise and Resurrection book was first published, the reaction from many European software engineers was “‘good enough’ is Yourdon’s apology for mediocre software!” But as I’ll suggest below, it actually represents a very careful, thoughtful, and delicate balance by the software developers, between several different constraints and objectives.

Okay, enough background and basics; so why do I think Twitter is good enough for the Enterprise? Well, because the contrary assertion (i.e., Krigsman’s original outburst on this topic) is usually based on the assumption that reliability/security/availability/stability is the most important characteristic of a software system or product, if not the only one worth discussing. Thus, you’ll hear comments like, “Well, maybe hobbyists and students would put up with this crappy consumer-oriented software product, but we IT professionals have to build rock-solid, industrial-strength software products for the organizations we work for!” The irony is that they often write such high-and-mighty statements in Microsoft Word, running on Microsoft Windows — which then crashes and displays the blue screen of death. Hey, seriously: if Microsoft Windows is good enough to be used so ubiquitously in every large Enterprise around the world, are you really going to pontificate about the occasional crashes and outages of a new product like Twitter?

Sure, if Twitter (or any other product) was being used to control nuclear reactors, or process all the financial transactions on the New York Stock Exchange, we would have very different expectations — or, in my language, our concept of what “good enough” really means for that application would be very different. But most of the mundane, day-to-day stuff that goes on in business organizations — from word processing to web-browsing to email to Twittering — doesn’t require a Mean Time Between Failure of 40 years. Most of the systems we build, and most of the software products we use, are not “safety critical” or even “mission critical.”

However, here’s an interesting observation, which I picked up from one of JP Rangaswami’s blogs listed above: the Los Angeles Fire Department set up a Twitter feed for real-time communication about the wildfires that swept through large portions of southern California in October 2007. I checked a few moments ago, in late December 2007, while writing this blog, and it’s still active today, even though the wildfires are long since gone, with 483 followers — who seem to be using it to post real-time messages about serious events the Fire Department needs to know about. Here’s one of the recent ones I saw this afternoon: “*UPDATE: Vanowen @ Valley Circle* 18 year old male with a fractured leg and minor head trauma w… Read more at http://tinyurl.com/26nr7s .” Now, I’ll admit that fractured legs and minor head trauma does not have the same degree of safety-criticality as a Three Mile Island incident; but it’s still reasonably serious stuff.

This illustrates one of several important points about the “good enough” concept:

• Whether a system is “good enough” depends on the available alternatives; apparently the 483 people following the LA Fire Department feel that Twitter is as good, if not better, than whatever other forms of communication exist (e.g., calling “911″ or some other telephone number).
• Our expectations about “good enough” typically change over a period of time, because we expect that software products (and software companies) will get better over time. So, what was good enough a decade ago (e.g., Windows 95) is not good enough today; and what’s good enough today (e.g. Windows Vista) may not be good enough tomorrow. (Whether Vista was good enough on the day it was released is something that the marketplace is still debating!)
• Along the same lines: just because something is judged “good enough” doesn’t mean that it’s perfect, or that we should refrain from suggesting improvements.
• The 483 people using Twitter to communicate with the LA Fire Department don’t care that I think Twitter is good enough, or that Michael Krigsman thinks it’s not. They think it’s good enough, and that’s what matters. (But it’s also important to know whether a substantial number of other citizens in the Los Angeles area decided that Twitter was not good enough. I’ll return to this point later.)

For those who still think that “good enough” is a sloppy concept, or an apology for mediocre software, let me suggest just the opposite: it’s a conscious, deliberate exercise of engineering tradeoffs. Think of it this way: from 50 years of computer science and software engineering research, we’ve accepted the reality that for anything larger than the most trivial program, we can’t prove that the program has no bugs. We can test the program until we run out of time, money, energy, or patience; but realistically, most programs will have bugs. And, sadly, most large programs will have bugs even after we’ve done a great deal of testing, and after we’ve put them into productive use. The question is how much time, money, and energy we want to expend, from the beginning of the development effort until the very end, to reduce the number of bugs to as small a number as possible. And that involves tradeoffs, because inevitably we develop our software with a finite supply of time, energy, and money. Every moment we use up, every ounce of energy we expend, every dollar we spend, could have been spent making the same program available sooner, or easier to use, or more rich with features and functions.

Yeah, yeah, I know that there are lots of good methods and techniques where we can kill several birds with one stone — i.e., develop software that’s cheaper and faster and less-buggy and available sooner. And I’m all in favor of such techniques, and agree that we should pursue them whenever possible. But at the end of the day, there will always be tradeoffs — and we’ll always have to listen to our customers (or “users,” or whatever else you call them) tell us what tradeoffs they are willing to live with.

So, as for Twitter:

1. It’s free — you can’t do better than that, in terms of price, and it makes me willing to accept the occasional crash or hiccup. Would I be willing to pay, say, $5 per month for a more robust version of Twitter that only crashed once a year? Maybe, maybe not; that’s one of the challenges facing the Twitter development team.
2. It has the basic features I need, for its fundamental purpose of supporting informal communication with a self-selected network of friends. Would I like more features? Well, yeah, I guess so. Would I be willing to pay $5 per month for a version of Twitter with a hundred new features? Maybe, maybe not.
3. It’s simple, and easy to use. You don’t need a manual, you don’t need a training course. You don’t have to put something on your resume that says you’re a “Microsoft Certified Twitter User.” Seems good enough to me.
4. It seems to have relatively simple security — i.e., you have to log in and provide your password in order to post tweets with your Twitter avatar/icon. But for all practical purposes, you have to assume that anyone on the Twitter network may see anything you post. That’s good enough for me, but presumably not good enough for the nice folks who work for the CIA or Homeland Security.
5. As of 6:30 PM this evening, 708,886 people said (according to the Twitter directory) that Twitter was good enough for them — because they’re using it. As far as I’m concerned, the opinions of this massive army dwarfs whatever opinion Krigsman and I might have; on the other hand, it’s worth noting that 708,886 people is a drop in the bucket compared to the 55 million people using Facebook. Large as Twitter’s subscriber base may seem to be, it could also be argued that we’re the “early adopters” of the product — and it’s well known that early adopters are far more likely to tolerate bugs and crashes in a new software product, in return for the benefits they enjoy by using the product before their competitors.

Having said all this, I can imagine that the CIO of, say, General Motors or General Electric might conclude that Twitter is too unreliable and too buggy to use in their organizations; but chance are that their decision would be based more heavily on the perceived lack of security, or the old-fashioned concern that Twitter will encourage lazy, undisciplined employees to goof off by chatting with each other. But these same employees can Twitter amongst themselves via cell phone — whether or not the CIO agrees, approves, or is even aware of what’s going on. And I think that’s something that Krigsman and I, along with anyone else who is going to join in this debate, needs to keep in mind: in the long run, the decision about whether Twitter is good enough for the Enterprise won’t be made by the CEO or the CFO or the CIO: it will be made by the employees themselves.

Well, maybe that’s not true for Enterprises with a capital “E” — i.e., very large companies that can still impose their rules and regulations on the moment-by-moment activities of their employees. Long term, I have my doubts about the ability of even the largest, most heavy-handed organization to completely control the use of personal technologies by their employees; but I do realize that, at least for the next few years, employees working in highly regulated industries may never get the chance to decide for themselves whether Twitter is good enough. And so maybe it will turn out that, in the short term, Twitter will be judged good enough only for enterprises with a small “e” — i.e., small to medium-sized companies and organizations.

As noted earlier, just because Twitter is good enough doesn’t mean that it’s perfect — nor does it mean that we would tolerate today’s level of Twitter-service a year from now. And it doesn’t mean that Twitter’s army of 708,886 users wouldn’t abandon the service en masse if a competitor offered a product/service that was more “good enough.” People (and companies) may feel that they’re “locked in” to Microsoft, and thereby forced to continue using products and services that they don’t think is good enough; and to some extent, the same problem has already emerged with services like FaceBook, MySpace, and Google. For each of us individually, it’s a problem with Twitter only if we find a “Better Twitter” and then have to persuade our network of followers and followees to move with us to the new environment.

But for now — considering the (free) price, considering the alternatives, considering the many of aspects of Twitter that do work well — I think it’s pretty clear that Twitter is good enough, at least for small and medium-sized enterprises. And if you let the individual employees make their own choice, I think Twitter will be judged good enough for large Enterprises too.

But don’t take my word for it. Just keep watching the Twitter directory, and see if it continues to grow in size. That’s where the decision will be made …