Interesting piece by Farhad Manjoo of Slate today entitled “So Gmail Was Down. Get Over It.” Manjoo notes that Google’s Gmail service went down briefly this week — for an hour and a half — and that led to a lot of people “freaking out” over the downtime. He asks” “Google’s e-mail service works 99.9 percent of time. Why do we freak out during the other 0.1 percent?”

That’s an good question, but I actually didn’t hear all that many people bitching about it this time around. In fact, I am rather surprised how little I heard about this incident. I think that’s because many of us are gradually growing accustomed to a world in which communications networks and digital devices deliver something less than the holy grail of “five 9s” uptime.  That was the standard for telephony and computing in the world I grew up in: 99.999% was the magic number that network engineers aspired to and that many of us in the public generally demanded.

Today, however, we settle for something less.  As Manjoo’s piece about Gmail suggests, we’ll settle “three 9s,” as in 99.9% reliability.  And sometimes we’ll settle for far less than that. Why is that?  I think Robert Capps has part of the answer in his recent Wired essay, “The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine.” Capps points out the modern Digital Age has seen the “triumph of what might be called Good Enough tech.  Cheap, fast, simple tools are suddenly everywhere.” He continues:

So what happened? Well, in short, technology happened. The world has sped up, become more connected and a whole lot busier. As a result, what consumers want from the products and services they buy is fundamentally changing. We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect. These changes run so deep and wide, they’re actually altering what we mean when we describe a product as “high-quality.”  And it’s happening everywhere.

I think that much is obvious. The triumph of “Good Enough” can be seen most notably in how we make phone calls today. Whether its the cell phone call that breaks up or drops out mid conversation, or the Skype call that sounds like two tin cans connected by string, the bottom line is we settle for something far less reliable today than we did in the past. When I was a kid growing up in rural Illinois and Indiana in the 70s, phones were blocky, all black, and plenty expensive. But they worked just fine. The call sounded great. I sometimes long for that quality today when struggling to put together a podcast and having to live with horrendous Skype quality problems.  Or when I am trying to listen to a conference call on my cell phone only to have the call dropped a couple of times, requiring me to call back in several times.

Robert Capps points out we have all made similar trade-offs for music. As an audiophile, I am just sick about the decline of high-quality music. The MP3 revolution has been marvelous in many ways, but the underlying quality of the music’s reproduction is not one of them.  Those of us with high-end audio equipment would be happy to do an “A/B” test for you non-believers any day of the week and show you just how lame over-compressed MP3s and satellite radio sound compared to CDs or, better yet, glorious old vinyl LPs!

But we live with these trade-offs because, as Capps suggests, flexibility, convenience and cost have improved so much.  Who doesn’t love the idea of carrying your entire music collection in your pocket on a media player or mobile phone that is smaller than a deck of cards?  And we all really like the sound of that when the the price is so nice; as in constantly falling. The price of communications connectivity and digital media have both plummeted in real terms compared to the past.

Thus, incidents like Gmail’s brief outage this week are likely to become less concerning for most of us as time goes on. Gmail a great free service that works great 99.9% of that time.  And that’s plenty good enough for most of us.

“Hasn’t Steve Jobs learned anything in the last 30 years?” asks Farhad Manjoo of Slate in an interesting piece about “The Cell Phone Wars” currently raging between Apple’s iPhone and the Google’s new G1, Android-based phone. Manjoo wonders if whether Steve Jobs remembers what happen the last time he closed up a platform: “because Apple closed its platform, it was IBM, Dell, HP, and especially Microsoft that reaped the benefits of Apple’s innovations.” Thus, if Jobs didn’t learn his lesson, will he now with the iPhone? Manjoo continues:

Well, maybe he has—and maybe he’s betting that these days, “openness” is overrated. For one thing, an open platform is much more technically complex than a closed one. Your Windows computer crashes more often than your Mac computer because—among many other reasons—Windows has to accommodate a wider variety of hardware. Dell’s machines use different hard drives and graphics cards and memory chips than Gateway’s, and they’re both different from Lenovo’s. The Mac OS, meanwhile, has to work on just a small range of Apple’s rigorously tested internal components—which is part of the reason it can run so smoothly. And why is your PC glutted with viruses and spyware? The same openness that makes a platform attractive to legitimate developers makes it a target for illegitimate ones.

I discussed these issues in greater detail in my essay on”Apple, Openness, and the Zittrain Thesis” and in a follow-up essay about how the Apple iPhone 2.0 was cracked in mere hours. My point in these and other essays is that the whole “open vs. closed” dichotomy is greatly overplayed. Each has its benefits and drawbacks, but there is no reason we need to make a false choice between the two for the sake of “the future of the Net” or anything like that.

In fact, the hybrid world we live in — full of a wide variety of open and proprietary platforms, networks, and solutions — presents us with the best of all worlds. As I argued in my original review of Jonathan Zittrain’s book, “Hybrid solutions often make a great deal of sense. They offer creative opportunities within certain confines in an attempt to balance openness and stability.”  It’s a sign of great progress that we now have different open vs. closed models that appeal to different types of users.  It’s a false choice to imagine that we need to choose between these various models.

Which raises a second point I always stress: There are an infinite number of points along the “open vs. closed” spectrum.  In reality, there are very few products that are perfectly “open” or “closed” out there. These are terms of art, not science.  The iPhone is becoming more “open” with each passing day.  Granted, it’s not as open as the Windows Mobile and certainly not as open as Android, but many people feel those platforms aren’t perfectly open either, or have that they have their own sets of problems.  Bottom line is, you can shop around and find the phone (and level of “openness”) that is right for you. No one is forcing you to buy an iPhone.

Third, efforts to tightly bottle up any technology or business model these days are usually doomed to fail. It’s not just the iPhone that is cracked in mere hours these days; seemingly every new gadget and service has a small army of hackers waiting to pounce when the product doesn’t do everything that consumers want it to. It’s getting harder and harder for product developers to “cripple” or limit functionality out of the gate.  They either offer it immediately or someone else we make sure it is offered for them.

Fourth and final point: The proper policy position with regards to the “open vs. closed” debate should be one of techno-agnosticism.  Lawmakers and courts should not be tilting the balance in one direction or the other.  Let the great experiment (and debate) continue.