Quality is definitely a small factor in success, when we're talking about network effects. When we add in capital, with all its perverse incentives, quality mat

Quality is definitely a small factor in success, when we're talking about network effects. When we add in capital, with all its perverse incentives, quality matters even less. Technologies become popular primarily based on how easy or cost-effective they are to replicate. The fewer concepts you introduce, the lower the bar is for people to reproduce your intellectual inventions; the cheaper the materials and manufacturing process, the easier it is for knock-offs to be manufactured. Popularity means a plurality of knock-offs. Quality often requires subtlety and attention to detail -- two things that add effort to replication, and thus work against popularity. The web became popular not because it was better than the alternatives but because it was stupider than the alternatives -- it had fewer features, fewer ideas, and fewer nuances. The web is no longer less featureful or nuanced than its competitors, because unplanned organic development grows complexity like a rat with a radium drip grows tumors, so as a result the very simplicity that made the web grow so quickly in the first place would prevent it from growing again, had it not become the focal point of an enormous amount of lock-in and path-dependence. The web is a huge bureaucratic mess right now, just waiting to be disrupted by a superior hypertext system.