How often do superior alternatives fail to catch on?

How often do superior alternatives fail to catch on?
lemire.me

Great one-time success can create a protective buffer which allows inferior traits to persist through long periods of time.

Modern work is a marathon of text entry, and in light of this I believe that what is technically important about a keyboard in the long run is not speed or even accuracy, but ergonomics. I won't make any general claims, because it seems like it's never been possible to study, but as an anecdote I can offer my own experience. I used to type on QWERTY until I had to stop due to repetitive strain. In the fifteen years since I switched to Dvorak I have never had a single day when I finished work feeling any pain in my hands, whereas this was almost an every-day occurrence with QWERTY. I can type for hours without stopping, without pain. The design of the keyboard makes it pleasurable to type in English. Words roll off the fingers of both hands in relaxing patterns. My hands move very little. It's nice, and I would suggest it as an option to anyone who types or programs a lot and is having trouble with their hands, not because I have any financial or personal stake in it, but because it really helped me and I care about the health of my fellow tech workers. I have seen a lot of people taken down by their hands, and I have also seen many people try some crazy gimmicks.

In the same space, not considering the placement of the letters on the keyboard, there is an even more absurd technical anachronism embedded in almost every single keyboard on the market, including virtual ones on our phones. The keys are positioned not in clean vertical rows, but offset as if they have mechanical arms behind them. This is pure path dependence, and there is no conceivable reason why we are stuck with it thirty years after mechanical typewriters fell out of use except that those who learned on a mechanical typewriter couldn't even imagine to design or test a different positioning of the keys. It's not just the weird zig-zag pattern of the position of the keys that is anachronistic. Why should the backspace and delete keys (which are so essential when we are typing in the flexible medium of digital text) be relegated to the far corner of the keyboard? (TypeMatrix presents an example of a modern reconceptualization of the layout. I'm not affiliated but I do enjoy their products.)

To summarize, I think that this article presents a rather limited (and even ad hominem) attack on the keyboard issue, with acknowledgment but little appreciation of the degree of path dependency in tech development. How can Dvorak be better if the research was flawed? This is not a complete answer.

Of course we are going to end up in suboptimal equilibriums, and together we should appreciate this if we ever want to get out of them.