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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?

#91

Post by ghaff »

mannykannot wrote: post #51
launchtomorrow wrote: post #38

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…

The importance of the selection of Microsoft to provide the operating system for the IBM PC cannot be overemphasized. It was not the only thing that made Microsoft what it became (the decision to make Windows for PC-compatible computers, and to make decent business applications for it, were critical), but without the first step, it probably would not have been in a position to do what followed. There is also path-dep…

You touch on something that's a very important point: path dependence. There are a ton of both de jure and de facto technology standards that we are locked into at some level because they gained dominance at one point because of some combination of tech, marketing, industry dynamics, and more. Once Ethernet, USB, x86, or whatever gets established it's hard to kick it out for something else that is locally better.

This has become increasingly the case in much of the tech sector because of the increased importance of interoperability , ecosystems, and network effects. Conversely, you do see fairly rapid switching aware from online properties that aren't sticky because something new and shiny has come along.

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

#92

Post by ygaf »

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…

Every factor can be captured, but can we agree what isn't superiority? e.g. buying an ipad (vs a samsung tablet or whatever) to be the same as everyone else, is not a reflection of the virtues of the ipad. I would say the (simpler) winning product in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15776047 has true superiority because it can be perceived by anyone in a vacuum.

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

#93

Post by sho »

jandrese wrote: post #71
sho wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well that's unexpected! I'm aware that Oracle has a few features pg doesn't, and replication is supposed to be easier, but at extraordinary cost and with the added bonus of supporting one of the worst companies in tech.

I don't really think you can even compare them as they serve totally different markets. If I was the CTO at a Fortune 500 and needed a DB for my new global logistics system, fine, Oracle would be in the running. Since this is HN though, I was thinking in terms of startups - and a startup choosing Oracle would be pure insanity unless they had an amazingly good reason.

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

#94

Post by bobajeff »

MereInterest wrote: post #63
bobajeff wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've often wondered why alphabetical order isn't the default on phones. Given that most of the population that uses phones didn't learn to type. It really bothers me actually.

People know the alphabet as a one-dimensional object. Unless your keyboard has 26 keys all in order, the multiple rows don't correspond to an existing mental model. At that point, you can either choose qwerty, which pleases anyone who already knows it, or you can make a sort-of alphabetical layout, which pleases nobody. I'd be curious about your statement the most people who use phones didn't learn to type. Is that f…

If you know the alphabet you can easily guess where the keys will be. (In a alphabetically ordered keyboard)

Do you believe that most people who use phones know how to type?

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

#95

Post by btilly »

nayuki wrote: post #89
btilly wrote: post #88

There are lots of examples. For example a base 12 number system is superior to a base 10 one. Esperanto is strictly easier to learn than English and so would make for a better lingua franca than English does. What doesn't happen very often is that the market chooses a worse technology when we each can individually benefit from picking the better one. But the definition of "better" has to be right. Often things that a…

Is Esperanto really easier to learn than English? I'm basing on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Grammar English uses 26 un-accented letters, which is easily the lowest common denominator for typewriters and computer text systems. Esperanto has 28 letters with one type of diacritic. Esperanto has word inflections for case (e.g. subject vs. object) and more verb tenses than English. Are inflections really easie…

For years the lingua franca was French. (In fact lingua franca is an Italian phrase meaning "French language".) And based on experience, I believe that French is easier to learn.

The transition to English only happened after the British Empire became economically and politically dominant. It retained its importance because as England declined, the USA became one of the two world superpowers.

The big win of English is not that it is easy to learn. We often have parallel words for the same thing (eg earth vs dirt). Words that would be related in any other language aren't (eg cow vs beef). Attempt to read http://www.i18nguy.com/chaos.html aloud if you need further convincing.

The big win is that the people you most want to talk to already speak it.

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

#96

Post by sho »

user5994461 wrote: post #77
jandrese wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Developers would rather die than spend a dollar on any product

That's just silly. I'm a developer and I have spent plenty of money on good products that help my work. Hell, literally today I dropped $30 on a word processor. And there is a huge market for developer-focussed SAAS and PAAS products.

> no matter how better it is or how bad they will suffer

Example? Citation needed.

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

These cryptic pronouncements are kind of useless. Again, give an example. Out of those things on your list I'd give you mongodb as a hype-driven mistake but that's pretty much it.

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

#97

Post by stretchwithme »

I remember OS/2 was allegedly superior To Windows 95. But it failed because there were far fewer applications for it. IBM had to to pay Netscape to finally port their browser to it.

I used to say OS/2 was HALF an OS, as it was missing a very important half of the equation; all those annoying applications.

Plus I could never get it to stay installed on an IBM PC. I did it once, but never could do it a second time. So that third half of the equation was pretty weak too.

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

#98

Post by cyberpunk0 »

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…

Mostly marketing more often than not. Money and greed get what the want at the expense of others

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

#99

Post by revelation »

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…

This is a terrifically bad example to choose given the trillions of dollars invested in building roads and general infrastructure that make cars viable in the first place.

It is pretty clear now that cars are decidedly not the best solution to transport. It just so happened that they scaled the best, and now everything is designed around them.

It's just macro vs micro and hardly has anything to do with the product.

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

#100

Post by dctoedt »

btilly wrote: post #88

There are lots of examples. For example a base 12 number system is superior to a base 10 one. Esperanto is strictly easier to learn than English and so would make for a better lingua franca than English does. What doesn't happen very often is that the market chooses a worse technology when we each can individually benefit from picking the better one. But the definition of "better" has to be right. Often things that a…

Straying off topic a bit: If we native English speakers want our birth tongue to continue being the global language, we should make English as easy as possible for non-native speakers to learn and use — mainly by not looking down on intuitive-but-"bad" usages such as "it's" as the gender-neutral singular possessive pronoun.
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