Companies tend to over-serve customers in their products to the point that the surplus of performance metrics cannot be consumed. This leads to waste in R&D, build and operational resources, basically a waste of human capital. Over-serving products have been optimised well beyond what a user can consume.
The header graphic here comes from Nanda’s post.
The Google SRE book, some time before that:
While it’s tempting to ask for a system that can scale its load “infinitely” without any latency increase and that is “always” available, this requirement is unrealistic. Even a system that approaches such ideals will probably take a long time to design and build, and will be expensive to operate—and probably turn out to be unnecessarily better than what users would be happy (or even delighted) to have.
Wikipedians, explaining Herbert A. Simon’s concept of Satisficing:
Satisficing is a decision-making strategy or cognitive heuristic that entails searching through the available alternatives until an acceptability threshold is met. The term satisficing, a portmanteau of satisfy and suffice, was introduced by Herbert A. Simon in 1956, although the concept was first posited in his 1947 book Administrative Behavior. Simon used satisficing to explain the behavior of decision makers under circumstances in which an optimal solution cannot be determined. He maintained that many natural problems are characterized by computational intractability or a lack of information, both of which preclude the use of mathematical optimization procedures. He observed in his Nobel Prize in Economics speech that “decision makers can satisfice either by finding optimum solutions for a simplified world, or by finding satisfactory solutions for a more realistic world. Neither approach, in general, dominates the other, and both have continued to co-exist in the world of management science”.