The Plateau
This page is a work in progress, but if you're here, I probably linked it as a quick, short-hand way to provide a definition.
The Plateau, in most of my writing refers to the current long-standing "good enough" state of many things, for most people's use cases.
It can also be used to refer to a specific moment in time, or a particular plateau, e.g. in the 1990s when many PC OEMs were still selling IBM PC XT clones, as a plateau of that hardware being good enough for many popular DOS programs.
For me, it has several applications:
- Desktop-experience computing, when it comes to there being a baseline at which most normal people won't notice the difference between a computer from ~2011 with some moderate upgrades and, say, a brand new high end computer
- Audio: For a fairly heavy majority of people, a reasonably encoded 128-kilobit audio file is "good enough" for almost all of their music listening, and for a
- Even at the "audiophile" level you can often point to CD quality specifically, as "good enough" with some audiophiles claiming there's rarely any benefit to high-resolution audio
- Car performance and functionality: Mostly peaked in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with the intervening decades being about safety and the competing concerns of making the cars physically larger to malicioiusly comply with CAFE standards
- Railroad performance and functionality: Peaked in the 1970s with incremental improvements, safety design improvements, and some speed or acceleration improvements