How often do superior alternatives fail to catch on?

Post by MereInterest » Sun, Nov 26, 2017, 3:59 AM UTC

bobajeff wrote: post #94

MereInterest wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If the keys are laid out in a 1x26 keyboard, yes. If the keys are laid out in a more usable way, then no. If I can see the key 'j', I cannot guess whether 'm' will be to the right or left of it, without knowing the length of the row, and considering it at all times.

I would describe today's society as one in which typing is necessary for any basic tasks, and is universal, and so I don't see why smartphone users would be different from the norm in terms of typing ability. Are you using "typing" to refer only to "touch typing"?

Post by dilawar » Sun, Nov 26, 2017, 5:35 AM UTC

doiwin wrote: post #26

baddox wrote: post #24

Earlier 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?

The one who catch-on is fitter, and the fitter one catches on. Circular logic is complete.

Game theory literature should have this problem?

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

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