Very good is not nearly good enough

I ended my book Purple Cow with the admonition that "very good is bad." A few folks were confused by this, but a post on John Battelle's Searchblog reminded of my point... it's worth another look.

become.com is the brainchild of some of the founders of MySimon and other shopping sites. It is supposed to be the next big thing, a google-killer.

Become is very good. A quick bunch of searches demonstrates that it's a totally fine alternative to Froogle or some other shopping engines.

But there's no way in the world people are going to switch.

Customers don't switch for very good. What they've got is already very good! Google wasn't a very good alternative to Yahoo. It was something far bigger than that.

The only way to beat Google or Kodak or Fotomat or McKinsey or JetBlue or you name it is to be over-the-top better, to be remarkable, to change the game.

It's a great time to be a consumer. And it's harder than it's ever been to create stuff worth switching for.