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The other day (December 30, 2007) , I was looking for a good deal on a cheap but functional LCD monitor. After some research I settled on purchasing the Acer AL2216Wbd 22″ monitor due to positive reviews from a wide variety of sources.

While checking out prices at Amazon.com and Staples.com, I noticed that both places posted different warranty terms, different product dimensions and weight for the exactly the same product (with the same model number and classification). So whom should I believe? So I browse on over to the Acer USA site and the verdict is that Staples got the dimensions and weight correct but the warranty terms wrong. Amazon.com had listed many things incorrectly. TigerDirect.com incidentally had the correct specs.

So the lesson here is to check dimensions carefully while purchasing anything online that needs to fit into a fixed space. Better yet, sometimes it makes sense to see a product at a store and carry a measuring tape.

Please note that these are isolated mistakes. Both Staples.com and Amazon.com have been very good to me and mistakes happen.

The objective of any task is to get a desired result. And as long as the desired result is achieved, the activity can be termed a success. In business, you often come across people who are too detail oriented, thus wasting time or who diverge so much from the goal, that the objective is not realized.

Both behaviors tend to waste an organization’s funds. A useful approach to solving such issues to understand that sometimes ‘good enough’ is adequate and define ‘good enough’ before any task.

A real world example of a ‘good enough’ product is the Berkshire Hathaway website. Some say its, plain - too plain. Maybe its not standards compliant. But the bottom line, is that the website does what is supposed to do - which is inform its shareholders and anyone interested in the company and its activities. No wonder Warren Buffet can make and give away so much money.

Below are screen shots of two corporate websites. One company is doing really well and the other (Foxtons) with an award winning website recently filed for Chapter 11.

This post is an example of human error in our highly technology dependent ecosystem. This sort of stuff is bound to happen now and then, but the key is to build systems that can prevent or at least minimize the effects of human error.

The screen shots below are from Yahoo Finance from June 13, 2007. For a few minutes, the SIMG ticker was displaying the stock price for SIGM. Although the matter was corrected in a few minutes, the consequences of human action from incorrect information can be extreme. In the second screen shot, while the stock price has been corrected, the system still shows an incorrect loss.