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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?

#61

Post by baddox »

humanrebar wrote: post #59
doiwin wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how do we decide if qwerty or dvorak is fitter?

> So how do we decide if qwerty or dvorak is fitter? Ideally, stay out of it and let others decide for themselves. We don't need to decide that bikes are better than cars. We ought to just support both (paved roads, traffic laws, places to keep your vehicle while you shop, etc.). We don't need to decide that SSDs are better than disc drives. We just need to support the latest SATA standard. So, for qwerty vs dvorak,…

So do we just invest the same amount of public funds into automobile infrastructure and bicycle infrastructure? That seems overly simplistic.

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

#62

Post by bobajeff »

baddox wrote: post #57
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.

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?

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

#63

Post by MereInterest »

bobajeff wrote: post #54
doiwin wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how do we decide if qwerty or dvorak is fitter?

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 for a particular age group? Alternatively, for the developing world, where phones are more common than computers? I'm having difficulty seeing the justification for the statement.

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

#64

Post by humanrebar »

codingdave wrote: post #16

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…

> The reason "inferior" products succeed is because they may have some killer features desired by the market, or better tech support, or better sales and marketing

Or they have a monopoly of some sort: a patent, only product carried by vendors, only service available in the area, only product with a critical mass of users, owns your email domain, owns your data, etc.

That's not technical or business, at least not in the popular-in-the-market sense.

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

#65

Post by scholia »

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 product, you are very likely to go wrong, because having a technologically superior core product does not mean you have a better Whole Product. (See cassette tape vs DAT, Windows vs OS/2 and many more.)

The Whole Product concept was popularized by Geoffrey Moore in Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado, which were seminal books at places like Netscape. Before that, the key idea was TAM, the Technology Adoption Model, pioneered by Professor Everett Rogers in Diffusion of Innovations in 1962.

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

#66

Post by y4mi »

baddox wrote: post #61
humanrebar wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So how do we decide if qwerty or dvorak is fitter? Ideally, stay out of it and let others decide for themselves. We don't need to decide that bikes are better than cars. We ought to just support both (paved roads, traffic laws, places to keep your vehicle while you shop, etc.). We don't need to decide that SSDs are better than disc drives. We just need to support the latest SATA standard. So, for qwerty vs dvorak,…

So do we just invest the same amount of public funds into automobile infrastructure and bicycle infrastructure? That seems overly simplistic.

also impossible, because they're mostly done within the same context.

it's pretty rare to get dedicated cyclist lanes which were created separately to the rest of the road.

it's generally created simultaneously.

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

#67

Post by scarface74 »

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…

I was a diehard Apple user back in the 80s but PCs were clearly better in a lot of ways they were cheaper and because of the number of PC manufacturers more versatile.

After Windows 95 came out and before MacOS 10.1,Windows was better than Mac OS. Except for very brief windows, x86 was faster than the current 680x0 and PPC processors.

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

#68

Post by baddox »

y4mi wrote: post #66
baddox wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So do we just invest the same amount of public funds into automobile infrastructure and bicycle infrastructure? That seems overly simplistic.

also impossible, because they're mostly done within the same context. it's pretty rare to get dedicated cyclist lanes which were created separately to the rest of the road. it's generally created simultaneously.

There is still always some balance of priorities, even if it’s not made explicit in official budgets. That balance needs to be chosen somehow.

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

#69

Post by hyolaris »

Important topic but strawman examples in many ways.

In most of the important cases, you will have never heard of what could have been.

Also, often the problem is that better ideas weren't developed as much as they could have been. That is, we look back and compare the inferior but dominant product that was revised and revised because of it's problems and dominance, and the superior but abandoned product in it's unimproved state, which is some sort of survivorship bias.

The OP has a point but it's exaggerated.

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

#70

Post by jandrese »

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.

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