31–40 of 102 posts
That is, for example, just because BetaMax had a superior Feature X doesn't mean that Feature X matters to enough people. That feature exists in a broader expectations + wants + needs "eco-system." That momentum can be very difficult to redirect once it gets rolling.
Yes, a unique / superior feature _might_ be what wins you the market but it's not always that simple.
As 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.
You could ask “why do some attractive people marry ugly people?”. It’s because your reasons for choosing something are not necessarily the same as somebody else’s.
Actually if we were to rethink the keyboard based on the frequency of usage, it might make sense to place all the punctuation a bit closer to the home row for programmer keyboards.
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 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.
Of course, now that I present that argument, I realize it could be applied to text editors shortcuts and plugins, which I have customized extensively on all my main development machines. That said, I almost never do any significant coding on random machines, so the cost/benefit analysis might work out in my favor (I certainly behave as if it does). I also remap all my Caps Lock physical keys to Control/Command, which is pretty common among programmers but very rare among non-programmers. That’s another case where my gut says that the small rare inconveniences of using random computers are outweighed by my regular productivity increases.
However, I don’t have any actual data on this, so it turns out my argument in the first paragraph of this comment is really just a guess. I do intuitively feel like QWERTY to Dvorak is a much more significant alteration than Caps Lock to Ctrl or some customized hotkeys in my text editor of choice.
jenkins,nagios,graphite,jmeter,mysql,postgresql,puppet,vagrant,virtualbox,mongodb,npm,docker,openvpn.
What all these software have in common. They are the most popular despite being poor products and often having notably superior competitors.
If you mean superior in a technical sense (which unfortunately seems to be all a lot of startups and engineers focus on), then obviously there are tons of instances where 'superior' alternatives fail to catch on, simply because the 'superior' alternatives lack the non technical benefits of the older products or services.
Like how a new social network might be more decentralised and censorship resiliant than Facebook, but lack the community/userbase that makes Facebook valuable to begin with. Or how a CMS system might be better coded than WordPress, but have a UI that people find more awkward to use (or an install process that's overly tedious/annoying for non technical folk).
In that sense, a lot of superior alternatives fail to catch on simply because for all the 'objective' improvements they make, they just don't do what people need them to actually do. A community site or social network doesn't need the best codebase possible, a long laundry list of features or a censorship resistent setup, it needs a big enough community/userbase to get people invested in it.
Of course, even when all factors do line up... well, that doesn't exactly guarantee the alternative with succeed either. People aren't robots, and don't choose every action to be as rational as possible. The difference between two competitors can just as easily come down to pure luck, some perceived emotional connection, timing or anything else, not necessarily the quality of the product or organisation behind it.
Amiga workstations and Macs in the late 80s were way ahead of DOS's UX with its 640k RAM limits and poor CGA graphics capabilities. But they became the standard and caught up with the graphics and multimedia capabilities of the other two platforms 20 years later once they could invest into removing their technical debt.
In contrast, Amiga died a slow and painful death because of mismanagement and owner squabbles, even though they were used for much more than home gaming (real time TV station visuals) even into the early naughties. They were just much better than the alternatives. And ahead of its time as a technical platform and home PC.
Microsoft became Microsoft because they were better at marketing/business in the technology industry, not because they were better at building and shipping technology. Amiga workstations and Macs in the late 80s were way ahead of DOS's UX with its 640k RAM limits and poor CGA graphics capabilities. But they became the standard and caught up with the graphics and multimedia capabilities of the other two platforms 20 y…
As 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 ev…