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I wonder if the problem is that nobody will write something else because of the huge effort it will be, and there will be no users of the alternative until it a
by TwoBit 9y ago
I wonder if the problem is that nobody will write something else because of the huge effort it will be, and there will be no users of the alternative until it achieves some level of functionality. I wonder if there's an economics term for this conundrum.
- chongli 9y agoI wonder if there's an economics term for this conundrum It doesn't come from the field of economics but there is a very good term for why it's so hard to develop an alternative to complex systems like LaTeX: The Anna Karenina Principle [0] The reason nobody will jump on a LaTeX alternative is because everybody who uses LaTeX needs something different from it. In a way, you could say that LaTeX has a 'niche' in the long tail [1] of the distribution. The 'happy families' in this analogy would be everybody who gets by with Microsoft Word. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina_principle [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail