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How often do superior alternatives fail to catch on?
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Re: How often do superior alternatives fail to catch on?
#22Someone once told me that the porn industry played a part in the VHS/Betamax and Blu-Ray/HD DVD battles. While Betamax and HD DVD were technologically superior, utility drove adoption.
In what way was HD DVD technologically superior? Unlike BetaMax, there’s literally not a tech spec that it has a clear pronounced advantage with[0]. HD DVD couldn’t even really be seen as the VHS of the 2000s, while it had price and some basic utility advantages (cheaper to produce), it didn’t ever have the adoption (by the movie industry or by hardware manufacturers).
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_high_definitio...
Re: How often do superior alternatives fail to catch on?
#23It'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…
Reason.com is a presenting a political argument more than a scientific one. Their goal is to promote free markets, not to accurately decide the best keyboard. Of course they'll cherry-pick data to avoid the appearance of market failure.
> Why is the keyboard story receiving so much attention from such a variety of sources? The answer is that it is the centerpiece of a theory that argues that market winners will only by the sheerest of coincidences be the best of the available alternatives
> Because first on the scene is not necessarily the best, a logical conclusion would seem to be that market choices aren't necessarily good ones
By the way, the reason.com article also goes into an explanation of path dependence, which the grandparent mentions extensively.
Re: How often do superior alternatives fail to catch on?
#24Multiple dimensions. The common theme why people get confused about "superior" products not winning boils down to ignoring the multiple dimensions of quality. A product's overall "superiority" is a single score that compresses multiple scores of the various attributes of the product. If one is ignorant (or discounts the value) of the other dimensions, he will be perplexed why the supposedly "inferior" solution won. E…
I agree with everything you said, but you can also go too far in that direction of analysis. If you let the empirical gain in traction to sneak in as a factor in your analysis, you effectively have a tautology, and you lose all predictive power, similar to the misuse of the phrase “survival of the fittest,” where you conclude that variant A was “clearly” more “fit” than variant B because A survived and B didn’t.
It’s still important to recognize that a variant might “win” because of factors completely unrelated to its “fitness,” like an organization using its market power in an unrelated sector to promote its variant, or even just good old fashioned dumb luck.
Re: How often do superior alternatives fail to catch on?
#25As people have said already, you need to define what criteria you are using when you say something is "superior". On HN, there seems to be a divide between engineers who measure a product by its engineering quality vs. business folk who define product quality by its market success. They are not always the same thing. The reason "inferior" products succeed is because they may have some killer features desired by the m…
If quality is defined by success, the question whether superior alternatives ever lose out becomes trivial. They can't, by definition.
And now you've made it harder to discuss market failures and similar ideas, because you've eliminated some words that could intuitively be used to describe a useful distinction.
Re: How often do superior alternatives fail to catch on?
#26Multiple dimensions. The common theme why people get confused about "superior" products not winning boils down to ignoring the multiple dimensions of quality. A product's overall "superiority" is a single score that compresses multiple scores of the various attributes of the product. If one is ignorant (or discounts the value) of the other dimensions, he will be perplexed why the supposedly "inferior" solution won. E…
I agree with everything you said, but you can also go too far in that direction of analysis. If you let the empirical gain in traction to sneak in as a factor in your analysis, you effectively have a tautology, and you lose all predictive power, similar to the misuse of the phrase “survival of the fittest,” where you conclude that variant A was “clearly” more “fit” than variant B because A survived and B didn’t. It’s…
So how do we decide if qwerty or dvorak is fitter?
Re: How often do superior alternatives fail to catch on?
#27As people have said already, you need to define what criteria you are using when you say something is "superior". On HN, there seems to be a divide between engineers who measure a product by its engineering quality vs. business folk who define product quality by its market success. They are not always the same thing. The reason "inferior" products succeed is because they may have some killer features desired by the m…
But you’re dangerously close there to having no predictive power. Business folk may rightly judge a product by its market success, but some business folk need to decide where to invest resources in building new products. Hindsight is 20/20, and of course products that are widely viewed as having poor engineering quality can succeed and even dominate a market, for a variety of reasons.
But that doesn’t provide much evidence to support the claim that, when developing a new product, engineering quality doesn’t matter. Sure, we can take the fatalistic view that new product development is an unguided process like biological evolution, where we will only know which random mutations were successful when we observe their prominence many generations down the line. But clearly most people act as if they believe they can do better than uniform random (i.e. investors generally don’t invest the exact same amount in every new company or product they can find).
Re: How often do superior alternatives fail to catch on?
#28UI has the big problem of power vs casual/noob user and everyone stars as a noob. There are good compromises, usually the power-user tool is hard to get in to and more efficient.
Similar for switching away from QWERTZ.
Re: How often do superior alternatives fail to catch on?
#29People 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 quantifiable improvement and cost benefit is also important. Dvorak shows on average a 1-2% benefit to typing speed, which is basically not worth the time and effort lost to learning a new layout.
After how long usage was this measured? Do you have sources? How about Colemak and its variants?
Re: How often do superior alternatives fail to catch on?
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with everything you said, but you can also go too far in that direction of analysis. If you let the empirical gain in traction to sneak in as a factor in your analysis, you effectively have a tautology, and you lose all predictive power, similar to the misuse of the phrase “survival of the fittest,” where you conclude that variant A was “clearly” more “fit” than variant B because A survived and B didn’t. It’s…
So how do we decide if qwerty or dvorak is fitter?
Well,you try to design a test of typing speed and fatigue but it's very challenging because all your subjects are probably already familiar with qwerty keyboards even if they don't touch-type.
And then you conclude abstract fitness is irrelevant anyway because everyone uses qwerty and there are:
- Advantages in everyone using more or less the same thing
- No way you're going to make everyone incur huge costs and switch