Pick Two: Good, Fast, and Cheap...Right?

Perhaps it’s because my first full-time job was working in a recording studio for $3.65 an hour, but I’ve long been obsessed with finding the best value. The tricky thing is that maximum value isn’t always where you might expect. In the case of that recording gig, for example, I snagged about $50,000 of free studio time and a great real-world education along with my miserable paycheck.

When chasing value, I find one of the hardest challenges is to overcome the human tendency to grab the obvious bargain. Cheap things often cost more in the long run, as 19th-century philosopher John Ruskin noted. “It’s unwise to pay too much, but it’s worse to pay too little,” he wrote. “When you pay too much, you lose a little money. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought is incapable of doing [what] it was bought to do.”

Of course, technology alters that equation a bit. It’s a safe bet that Ruskin never used music software. Many of today’s commercial programs deliver astonishing power for the money, and there’s some superb freeware out there as well. But Ruskin’s point still holds. A colleague and I recently wasted eight hours trying to solve an audio problem with unstable, poorly documented shareware. Value can also be measured in time and effort.

Here in Silicon Valley, we celebrated the 20th anniversary of the IBM PC a few years back. The local newspaper interviewed David Bradley, the engineer who designed the PC’s notorious Ctrl-Alt-Delete reboot command. “As I like to joke,” he said, “I may have invented it, but Microsoft made it popular.’’

I was reminded of that line when, stymied by a persistent disk-corruption problem, I picked up a book on computer troubleshooting. Standing in the checkout line, I was darkly amused to realize I was hefting a thousand-page compendium of things that could go wrong with my computer. Though I eventually found the solution online, it was one that involved more effort and expense than I’d hoped.

Many people believe the answer is to simplify. George “The Fat Man” Sanger, with well over 200 videogame soundtracks to his credit, recommends (tongue in cheek) wrapping a big roll of duct tape around your computer once it’s working so you aren’t tempted to upgrade it. Still, the creative process involves pushing boundaries, and for many of us, that’s one of the exciting things about computers.

And after all, learning to use something well is the secret to getting the most value from it.

What are some of the best and worst values you’ve found?