11–20 of 102 posts
Excellent post. It's short and doesn't waffle. It has a coherent idea and at least I learned something new.
My personal opinion is that "superior" often means "cheap as shit and I'm willing to compromise a lot of stuff".
Start with the example of the top ten most popular pieces of music at the time. Do we generally conclude that these are the most meritorious musical compositions of the moment? Or are they popular because they happen to be catchy, or just raunchy enough to play on our base desires but not enough to be censored, or because the distributor has a deal to continuously play the song on the radio?
QWERTY is still popular mainly just because of momentum. At the time it came out many decades ago, it had some nice utility. But clearly the core idea of slowing down typing became outdated long ago. But when it comes down to it, learning a new keyboard is not easy.
To switch to a new way of doing things does not depend on having a better way. I believe it depends on some type of social networking effects and chance. For example, if several celebrities suddenly decide to create a Twitter campaign about the evils of QWERTY and incredible qualities of DVORAK, then it for some reason came standard in a new hot electronic device that happened to be trendy among teenagers, perhaps we would see a significant market switch.
This is one thing that I have noticed about some posts on HN. People will come on and say that their startup failed, and then come up with a list of rationalizations blaming various material qualities of their product or service. In most cases I believe this is quite an incorrect interpretation of events. They usually have a perfectly good or often superior product, which simply did not catch on. So I think that things like marketing are quite key to becoming popular, but again, being popular or not doesn't substantiate or unsubstantiate the quality of the product.
People usually do confuse popularity with merit. They are in fact, two completely different, and often fairly unrelated, characteristics. The keyboard that happens to have the most market share is the most popular one. It is not the superior one. Start with the example of the top ten most popular pieces of music at the time. Do we generally conclude that these are the most meritorious musical compositions of the mome…
And even back then it wasn't true. QWERTY keyboard was not designed to slow typist down, it was designed so letters that follow each other most often were as far on the hammer row (and thus on the keyboard) as possible.
People usually do confuse popularity with merit. They are in fact, two completely different, and often fairly unrelated, characteristics. The keyboard that happens to have the most market share is the most popular one. It is not the superior one. Start with the example of the top ten most popular pieces of music at the time. Do we generally conclude that these are the most meritorious musical compositions of the mome…
The qwerty layout was designed to minimise jams, not to "slow down typing".
People usually do confuse popularity with merit. They are in fact, two completely different, and often fairly unrelated, characteristics. The keyboard that happens to have the most market share is the most popular one. It is not the superior one. Start with the example of the top ten most popular pieces of music at the time. Do we generally conclude that these are the most meritorious musical compositions of the mome…
It's true that there isn't necessarily much difference in typing speed between QWERTY and Dvorak layouts, for trained typists (even the same typist). However, we might say that we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater when we claim that Dvorak is technically not superior because weak studies showed little to no marginal improvement in a few particular metrics. Modern work is a marathon of text entry, and in lig…