Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How often do superior alternatives fail to catch on?

lemire.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 102 posts

Re: How often do superior alternatives fail to catch on?

#71

Post by jandrese »

sho wrote: post #49
user5994461 wrote: post #36

Most of the time. Take a look at developer tools for instance: 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.

Your list makes no sense to me. PostgreSQL is a poor product with noticeably superior competitors? This is - how should I put it? - a niche opinion. And besides, popularity is its own quality sometimes. NPM might not be the "best" but everything's on it so it's the most useful. A lot of devops people already know docker. If you need to hire, there's a deep pool to draw from. That counts for a lot.

I'm guessing he's referring to Oracle as the competitor.

Re: How often do superior alternatives fail to catch on?

#72

Post by jasode »

scholia wrote: post #65
jasode wrote: post #10

Multiple 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…

There's a much better framework for understanding this stuff in the concept of the Whole Product. The Whole Product is not just the core product. You have to add on all the things like reliability, service and support (the expected product), its expansion capabilities (the augmented product), and its potential for future development (the potential product) to get "the whole product". If you just look at the core prod…

>The Whole Product concept was popularized by Geoffrey Moore in Crossing the Chasm

I see the value in Geoffrey Moore's framework. There are similar analysis frameworks. One is MCDA (multi-criteria decision framework)[1] and another is SWOT Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats[2]. There must be a dozen others.

But I would still generalize them down to "multiple dimensions" because one can use it for non-commercial products sold for free such as comparing GCC vs Clang/LLVM -- or -- compare non-specific products such as "categories of products". An example of comparing multi-dimensions of categories such as "live theater" vs "movies".

Without GM's book and his framework, if we see someone say that "GCC is superior to Clang because it targets more cpus than Clang and the resultant binaries of LAME MP3 and FFMpeg compiled by GCC have better performance", it means the commenter is leaving out other dimensions to support his conclusion of GCC superiority. By omitting the missing dimensions, the observation that Clang/LLVM is winning over GCC in the "marketplace of ideas" seems totally illogical. But once one adds in additional dimensions such as Clang not forcing a GNU license and/or Clang exposing the AST parse tree, its adoption makes more sense.

Same for categories like "theater vs movies". When movies first came out, some experts believed that films would be a fad because "audiences want to see _real_ actors in person and not some _artificial_ projection on a screen". The experts were only focused on one dimension: the appeal of the audience being in the same physical space as the actors. They ignored all the other positive dimensions that films allow such as closeups on actors faces. (E.g. a live stage play's script can't rely on very subtle facial responses such as an eyebrow raise or a tiny smirk of the lips because anybody beyond the 3rd row won't even see it. Stage dialogue with whispers can't be real whispers, they have to very loud and very fake stage whispers. Films also allow alternating time and location cutting for storytelling. But live Broadway theater is also still around -- because it has quality dimensions some people prefer.)

A lot of arguments on the forums about X being superior to Y are really people favoring different dimensions and then talking past each other. Since people can't agree on all the dimensions/criteria to consider and how to weigh them, the debates remain unresolved.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-criteria_decision_ana...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWOT_analysis

Re: How often do superior alternatives fail to catch on?

#73

Post by canjobear »

jasode wrote: post #10

Multiple 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…

It's true that in most cases if one thing beats another, you can find some dimension on which the winner was superior. But it isn't necessarily true in all cases. If it is the case that sometimes things win only due to entrenchment or random network effects, then there may be some cases where the winner is strictly worse than the loser, though these cases will be rare. If you found one, though, it would be the strongest possible evidence that sometimes markets/evolution/whatever don't pick the best thing. The OP is asking for those examples.

Re: How often do superior alternatives fail to catch on?

#74

Post by zZorgz »

peatmoss wrote: post #60
donatj wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But also a fair amount less finger motion (I did test this to my own satisfaction some years ago) for a given set of text. And qualitatively, I do think that has translated into less wrist strain. I’m not a particularly fast keyboardist, and I don’t particularly care about the speed differences of dvorak vs. qwerty. But, I do quite appreciate what I believe to be real ergonomic benefits. My wife switched a few years…

I believe there is a lack of proof the ergonomic benefits are significant outside of typing tests which are very unrealistic to day to day tasks (unless you have a pure typist job). A bias also exists when many people that switch layouts never touch typed well or properly in QWERTY to begin with, or lose comfort awareness as they forget how to type well in QWERTY. I speak as someone that touch types equally well in QWERTY and Colemak, and think time would be spent better sticking to or learning QWERTY better.

Re: How often do superior alternatives fail to catch on?

#75

Post by jasode »

baddox wrote: post #24
jasode wrote: post #10

Multiple 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…

>, 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

That's a good point. I'd have to give it more thought on how much predictive power we're supposed to ascribe to multiple-dimensions.

Maybe multiple dimensions is a better thinking tool for experimentation than prediction. This frees one from being paralyzed by the status quo. For example, a 1990s entrepreneur sees that the internet is becoming popular and maybe he thinks he can sell books on it. But then he goes to Barnes & Noble and sees that people are pulling real books off the shelves, taking them to the lounge chairs, and then leisurely sitting down and flipping through the pages before buying. If the dimension of "in-store experience" constrains the worldview, it will not occur to the entrepreneur that other dimensions like near-infinite selection in a "virtual bookshelf" and convenient delivery to the home will be prioritized over the store's lounge chairs. One doesn't know if those other dimensions for "book buying" matter more to buyers until he tries it.

Another well-known example of constrained single-dimensional thinking is analyzing the Blackberry vs the iPhone in 2007. Both the CEO of Research In Motion and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft were focused on the physical tactile keyboard. They saw that the iPhone obviously lacked real QWERTY buttons, so they both predicted it would flop in the marketplace. Steve Jobs' Apple team ignored the dimension that RIM & Microsoft used for criticism. Instead, they looked at the dimension of "screen size" and made it larger. The also bet on the dimension of "capacitive touch screen" which enables finger gestures. These were the dimensions that a billion smartphone buyers ultimately preferred. The Blackberry was cheaper and buyers still preferred the iPhone touchscreens.

Re: How often do superior alternatives fail to catch on?

#76

Post by c22 »

bobajeff wrote: post #62
baddox wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a good point, although one could easily point out that “alphabetical order” is also a completely arbitrary convention, and we could just as easily argue whether we ought to change how we teach that order. Perhaps a different ordering of the alphabet, like sorting by usage frequency or grouping the vowels and consonants together, would help everyone learn to read and write. The same type of argument could appl…

But my argument didn't involve teaching anything to anyone. It was simply accepting the fact that most people are more familiar to alphabetical order. What benefit is there to having everyone hunt and peck on a phone to keep with a convention that only really makes sense to typists?

The hunt-and-peckers will still be hunting and pecking on an ABC keyboard, at least the typists don't have to. Also, the first adopters of smartphones probably did have overwhelming keyboard experience, so I can totally see how we got here. Fortunately in phone land the default is just that and easily changed by anyone who thinks another layout would work better.

Re: How often do superior alternatives fail to catch on?

#77

Post by user5994461 »

jandrese wrote: post #70
user5994461 wrote: post #36

Most of the time. Take a look at developer tools for instance: 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.

Your list is heavily loaded with free products that are good enough. The lesson is that if a commercial product wants to be widely adopted it needs to be significantly better than the similar free products to compensate for the hassles and headaches of buying software (and the god damn support contracts). Simply being free is a major advantage right off the bat.

Developers would rather die than spend a dollar on any product, no matter how better it is or how bad they will suffer.

That's only half the lesson though, because some of the alternatives are free or free up to N users.

The other half of the lesson is branding and hype cycle.

Re: How often do superior alternatives fail to catch on?

#79

Post by zZorgz »

baddox wrote: post #34
donatj wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t even think that learning a new layout is the dealbreaker. I think the dealbreaker is that, no matter how you work, you will occasionally need to use a computer with a standard keyboard layout. It may not be very often at all (the last time I used a random computer was an on-site programming interview with the company’s PC, and that was a text editing disaster despite my familiarity with QWERTY, though I still…

People can also cope with switching from different setups if trained well enough in both, which should not be too surprising. Eg: shortcuts in vim vs native editor shortcuts, scroll direction, one key swap.. It’s even possible for full blown keyboard layouts. I type using QWERTY and Colemak both on a regular basis, although I’ve not tested how long I can go without a layout to retain it, but forgetting is harder than relearning in that case.

Re: How often do superior alternatives fail to catch on?

#80

Post by psyc »

baddox wrote: post #24
jasode wrote: post #10

Multiple 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…

I was going to make the same comment about the tautology in pure survival, although I do acknowledge your parent comment’s point that there could be a more accurate predictive metric. We don’t want to deny that there is an element of “irrationality” at play, just because there is a winner.
Post reply on HN