How often do superior alternatives fail to catch on? • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by snuxoll » Sat, Nov 25, 2017, 6:17 PM UTC

VladimirGolovin wrote: post #46

A related thought based on my recent experience. One of my teams is currently using a mesh colorization system for our game, which we developed in-house. E.g. we have a game level where each mesh is assigned some color ID, such as "primary accent" or "background1" (but not an actual RGB color); and there are color schemes which we can apply to the level according to these color IDs to get different looks. The first v…

If you’re a touch typist physical keyboard layout doesn’t matter too much. Beyond ergonomics, at least.

On that note, I’m loving the increasing number of games that read the OS keyboard layout and display appropriate key mappings instead of assuming every gamer uses QWERTY (some games do even worse and don’t use the key code but the mapped character forcing me to rebind keys or switch layouts).

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

#82

Post by codingdave » Sat, Nov 25, 2017, 6:22 PM UTC

baddox wrote: post #45

aaavl2821 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You typically don't try to "predict", you just learn about customers' wants and needs and solve for those. Why try to guess what attributes are important in a product when you can just ask / test

As far as I can tell, product development is still guided, at the bare minimum by the ability of humans to predict other humans’ preferences based on an assumption of similarities between humans’ minds. I’m not aware of any product development that is intentional truly random, other than perhaps some details like the color of a button.

Are you saying that talking to your customers, and solving for their needs is "random"?

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

#83

Post by tw1010 » Sat, Nov 25, 2017, 6:42 PM UTC

To add a bit of insight to the conversation, beyond "it's a matter of more dimensions than one", which people have already commented on. This whole situation could also be seen from an economics perspective. Demand for a product, let's say a can of soda, is called "elastic" when customers will switch from one vendor to another purely based on price. If one vendor has a lower price than another, all customers, in this idealized model, will head directly to that place to buy their soda, leaving the more expensive one in the dust. In this situation, however, demand for the thing, keyboard layouts, is "inelastic". That means that the factor that we'd think would be the only property of keyboards to matter for customers, is not in fact all that matters. Another thing that affects whether they will switch is how long it will take to learn the new layout.

TLDR; demand for quality in keyboard layouts is inelastic. There are other variables in play. One of them is the fact that there is a lot of friction (in terms of setup, having to learn a new layout, etc) for customers to switch from one layout to another.

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

#84

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Nov 25, 2017, 6:42 PM UTC

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?

[deleted]

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

#85

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Nov 25, 2017, 6:47 PM UTC

tw1010 wrote: post #83

To add a bit of insight to the conversation, beyond "it's a matter of more dimensions than one", which people have already commented on. This whole situation could also be seen from an economics perspective. Demand for a product, let's say a can of soda, is called "elastic" when customers will switch from one vendor to another purely based on price. If one vendor has a lower price than another, all customers, in this…

[deleted]

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

#86

Post by timthelion » Sat, Nov 25, 2017, 6:59 PM UTC

I believe that the 90-90 rule [1] proves that many superior alternatives will fail to catch on. If something is not revolutionary better, and has the potential to compete with a product, but has not been developed to the point of actual competitiveness, it will lose out.

Combine this with network effects, and it seems that it would be impossible for superior techs not to fail.

Take email headers as an example. They are objectively inefficient and hard to parse. Everyone agrees on that. But we still use them despite the obvious possibility of a better format. Why? Obvious network effect.

The 90-90 examples will be less obvious. You cannot easily tell which tech is better, until you have invested the same amount of effort developing all of them. Superior products will be more likely to eventually succeed in markets where such parallel development is justified. Currently, most speakers are made by gluing a permanent magnet to a piece of plastic or paper, and using an electromagnet to pull on the permanent one. Through parallel development, we now know, that we can make much much better speakers by making the membrane magnetic, by gluing copper traces onto it, or statically charging it. We can make objectively better sound with these lighter membranes which don't have a heavy permanent magnet glued to them. Slowly, expensive speakers and headphones are using the new tech, but most speakers sold sill use the inferior tech. The superior tech was developed parallel to the inferior one, only because speakers are such a large market, that this parallel development could be justified financially.

Now take braille displays. A much smaller market. We think that the current tech used in Braille displays is worse than a set of other techs. There isn't enough money for the parallel development, so despite the fact that alternative, probably superior, technologies exist, we haven't developed them to the point of competitiveness.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-ninety_rule

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

#87

Post by Dylan16807 » Sat, Nov 25, 2017, 7:04 PM UTC

jsjohnst wrote: post #22

joeblau wrote: post #12

Someone once told me that the porn industry played a part in the VHS/Betamax and Blu-Ray/HD DVD battles. While Betamax and HD DVD were technologically superior, utility drove adoption.

In what way was HD DVD technologically superior? Unlike BetaMax, there’s literally not a tech spec that it has a clear pronounced advantage with[0]. HD DVD couldn’t even really be seen as the VHS of the 2000s, while it had price and some basic utility advantages (cheaper to produce), it didn’t ever have the adoption (by the movie industry or by hardware manufacturers). [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_o…

Agreed, HD DVD was the cheaper and technologically inferior option.

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

#88

Post by btilly » Sat, Nov 25, 2017, 7:32 PM UTC

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 are worse on one axis are better on another. See https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html for a famous essay about the difference between what makes software good versus readily adopted.

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

#89

Post by nayuki » Sat, Nov 25, 2017, 7:40 PM UTC

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 easier to use than having auxiliary words or relying on word order?

I think English became a lingua franca for a reason, because it has far fewer grammatical and orthographic features than other European languages like French, German, etc. I think Esperanto has more complex features of European languages than English.

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

#90

Post by notthemessiah » Sat, Nov 25, 2017, 7:43 PM UTC

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…

Perfect example is how the OP say goes so far to say bat lungs are better (because they are more efficient as they have more surface area per volume) but they also are seemingly more fragile: suffering barotrauma from extreme changes in pressure: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14593-wind-turbines-m....

> Baerwald and her colleagues believe that birds do not suffer the same fate as bats – the majority of birds are killed by direct contact with the blades – because their lungs are more rigid than those of bats and therefore more resistant to sudden changes in pressure.