11 ms·

How often do superior alternatives fail to catch on?

111 points by deafcalculus 9y ago

Pica_soO 9y ago
Often, because in the calculation of the provider, one factor never appears. Training-time, if a superior tool comes along, making it necessary to retrain to do the same work, its not superior, its inferior until the gain is so big that the productivity loss is visible to the customer. That is why even with superior software it is necessary to add a "Legacy"-user interface, that allows for a easy switch from old software, while at the same time retraining people to use the new interface. This changes the transition costs.
Gravityloss 9y ago
Excellent post. It's short and doesn't waffle. It has a coherent idea and at least I learned something new.
- Rainymood 9y ago
  Personally, if I may be crude, found the post to be too short and unsubstantiated. I can honestly not imagine this is a "serious" post by a professor (!). It's so short-sighted I don't even know where to begin. My personal opinion is that "superior" often means "cheap as shit and I'm willing to compromise a lot of stuff".
raverbashing 9y ago
I agree "Superior" has to be followed by: "superior to whom?" and "superior in what aspect?" "X is better than Y" but X does not do what Y does then it's not superior if it won't solve a problem.
jondubois 9y ago
I do think that superior alternatives will catch up eventually if they stay in the game long enough... The problem is that sometimes the window of opportunity can be suppressed for very long periods of time; sometimes several generations... Maybe even several centuries. Great one-time success can create a protective buffer which allows inferior traits to persist through long periods of time.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
badsectoracula 9y ago
While i agree with the sentiment that the supposedly superior product isn't actually that superior all the time, the given examples are a bit cherrypicking-ish. For example the BetaMax vs VHS comparison is about image quality, not length (and FWIW BetaMax could record 2 hours, but it is true that VHS thanks to its size could record more than that). Similarly the mammals vs birds comparison feels a bit stretchy - like calling a tomato salad a "fruit salad" because tomato is technically a fruit.
hyperpallium 9y ago
When there's a new, far superior way of doing things, it always catches on. But usually there are several different versions of this new way, with slightly different properties, trade-offs and non-product features (like marketing, support, compatibility, price etc) - which of these wins out is a crap-shoot. That's why some companies, investors and customers back different versions... and the pragmatic ones wait for a market leader to emerge.
eggie 9y ago
It's true that there isn't necessarily much difference in typing speed between QWERTY and Dvorak layouts, for trained typists (even the same typist). However, we might say that we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater when we claim that Dvorak is technically not superior because weak studies showed little to no marginal improvement in a few particular metrics. Modern work is a marathon of text entry, and in light of this I believe that what is technically important about a keyboard in the long run is not speed or even accuracy, but ergonomics. I won't make any general claims, because it seems like it's never been possible to study, but as an anecdote I can offer my own experience. I used to type on QWERTY until I had to stop due to repetitive strain. In the fifteen years since I switched to Dvorak I have never had a single day when I finished work feeling any pain in my hands, whereas this was almost an every-day occurrence with QWERTY. I can type for hours without stopping, without pain. The design of the keyboard makes it pleasurable to type in English. Words roll off the fingers of both hands in relaxing patterns. My hands move very little. It's nice, and I would suggest it as an option to anyone who types or programs a lot and is having trouble with their hands, not because I have any financial or personal stake in it, but because it really helped me and I care about the health of my fellow tech workers. I have seen a lot of people taken down by their hands, and I have also seen many people try some crazy gimmicks. In the same space, not considering the placement of the letters on the keyboard, there is an even more absurd technical anachronism embedded in almost every single keyboard on the market, including virtual ones on our phones. The keys are positioned not in clean vertical rows, but offset as if they have mechanical arms behind them. This is pure path dependence, and there is no conceivable reason why we are stuck with it thirty years after mechanical typewriters fell out of use except that those who learned on a mechanical typewriter couldn't even imagine to design or test a different positioning of the keys. It's not just the weird zig-zag pattern of the position of the keys that is anachronistic. Why should the backspace and delete keys (which are so essential when we are typing in the flexible medium of digital text) be relegated to the far corner of the keyboard? (TypeMatrix presents an example of a modern reconceptualization of the layout. I'm not affiliated but I do enjoy their products.) To summarize, I think that this article presents a rather limited (and even ad hominem) attack on the keyboard issue, with acknowledgment but little appreciation of the degree of path dependency in tech development. How can Dvorak be better if the research was flawed? This is not a complete answer. Of course we are going to end up in suboptimal equilibriums, and together we should appreciate this if we ever want to get out of them.
jasode 9y ago
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.g. I never understood why bicycles didn't beat out cars. Bicycles are obviously superior because: + narrow profile can squeeze through tight alleys or even heavily treed forests that cars can reach + requires no fossil fuel that emits pollution + costs less than 1/100th the price of a car + easily repaired by homeowners in the garage because no computers + etc, etc That fixation on those attributes causes the confused person to totally miss the other positive attributes of the car: + travel faster than 25 mph with minimum physical exertion + typical size car can carry 5 adults which is ~1000 pounds of weight + carry entire week's worth of groceries (~10 bags) + occupants don't get wet when when it rains If one doesn't understand the all the multidimensions of qualities and weigh them in an objective manner that's detached from personal preferences, he'll always be confused why "superior" USENET lost to "inferior" Reddit, or why "superior" Lisp lost the popularity contest to "inferior" C++/Java/Python/Go/etc, or why Mac OS 9 lost to Windows NT. Likewise, there were multidimensional factors to Betamax vs VHS and "picture quality" was only one of them.
- baddox 9y ago
  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 still important to recognize that a variant might “win” because of factors completely unrelated to its “fitness,” like an organization using its market power in an unrelated sector to promote its variant, or even just good old fashioned dumb luck.
  - doiwin 9y ago
    So how do we decide if qwerty or dvorak is fitter?
joeblau 9y ago
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.
- jsjohnst 9y ago
  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_of_high_definition_optical_disc_formats https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_high_definitio...
  - Dylan16807 9y ago
    Agreed, HD DVD was the cheaper and technologically inferior option.
ilaksh 9y ago
People usually do confuse popularity with merit. They are in fact, two completely different, and often fairly unrelated, characteristics. The keyboard that happens to have the most market share is the most popular one. It is not the superior one. Start with the example of the top ten most popular pieces of music at the time. Do we generally conclude that these are the most meritorious musical compositions of the moment? Or are they popular because they happen to be catchy, or just raunchy enough to play on our base desires but not enough to be censored, or because the distributor has a deal to continuously play the song on the radio? QWERTY is still popular mainly just because of momentum. At the time it came out many decades ago, it had some nice utility. But clearly the core idea of slowing down typing became outdated long ago. But when it comes down to it, learning a new keyboard is not easy. To switch to a new way of doing things does not depend on having a better way. I believe it depends on some type of social networking effects and chance. For example, if several celebrities suddenly decide to create a Twitter campaign about the evils of QWERTY and incredible qualities of DVORAK, then it for some reason came standard in a new hot electronic device that happened to be trendy among teenagers, perhaps we would see a significant market switch. This is one thing that I have noticed about some posts on HN. People will come on and say that their startup failed, and then come up with a list of rationalizations blaming various material qualities of their product or service. In most cases I believe this is quite an incorrect interpretation of events. They usually have a perfectly good or often superior product, which simply did not catch on. So I think that things like marketing are quite key to becoming popular, but again, being popular or not doesn't substantiate or unsubstantiate the quality of the product.
- dozzie 9y ago
  > QWERTY [...] the core idea of slowing down typing became outdated long ago. And even back then it wasn't true. QWERTY keyboard was not designed to slow typist down, it was designed so letters that follow each other most often were as far on the hammer row (and thus on the keyboard) as possible.
- taneq 9y ago
  > But clearly the core idea of slowing down typing became outdated long ago. The qwerty layout was designed to minimise jams, not to "slow down typing".
jstewartmobile 9y ago
Whether it's a computer or a bar of soap, most things have so many aspects that even the experts can't agree, so A) All the damn time.
codingdave 9y ago
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 market, or better tech support, or better sales and marketing -- in other words, the business quality beats out technical problems. Ideally, you'd have high quality in both areas, but that isn't reality in most organizations.
- Certhas 9y ago
  If quality is defined by success, the question whether superior alternatives ever lose out becomes trivial. They can't, by definition. And now you've made it harder to discuss market failures and similar ideas, because you've eliminated some words that could intuitively be used to describe a useful distinction.
  - blowski 9y ago
    The problem is that people want market success to be a consequence of engineering quality. But a lot of people are interested in a lot more than engineering quality. So the products with the best code don’t necessarily make the most money. You could ask “why do some attractive people marry ugly people?”. It’s because your reasons for choosing something are not necessarily the same as somebody else’s.
- baddox 9y ago
  But you’re dangerously close there to having no predictive power. Business folk may rightly judge a product by its market success, but some business folk need to decide where to invest resources in building new products. Hindsight is 20/20, and of course products that are widely viewed as having poor engineering quality can succeed and even dominate a market, for a variety of reasons. But that doesn’t provide much evidence to support the claim that, when developing a new product, engineering quality doesn’t matter. Sure, we can take the fatalistic view that new product development is an unguided process like biological evolution, where we will only know which random mutations were successful when we observe their prominence many generations down the line. But clearly most people act as if they believe they can do better than uniform random (i.e. investors generally don’t invest the exact same amount in every new company or product they can find).
ddmma 9y ago
The tipping point by Malcom Gladwell might have an extensive answer on this matter and is similar effect to epidemics.
k__ 9y ago
Professionality? You can basically ship crap if you do it professionally.
anotheryou 9y ago
UI has the big problem of power vs casual/noob user and everyone stars as a noob. There are good compromises, usually the power-user tool is hard to get in to and more efficient. Similar for switching away from QWERTZ.
chiefalchemist 9y ago
Why? Because context matters. That is, for example, just because BetaMax had a superior Feature X doesn't mean that Feature X matters to enough people. That feature exists in a broader expectations + wants + needs "eco-system." That momentum can be very difficult to redirect once it gets rolling. Yes, a unique / superior feature _might_ be what wins you the market but it's not always that simple.
zimbatm 9y ago
For programmers, QWERTY is actually superior to DVORAK in my opinion. The US keyboard variant more specifically as most language designs have been influenced by how reachable each punctuation is to that specific layout. And with auto-complete, the alphabet placement is not that important. Actually if we were to rethink the keyboard based on the frequency of usage, it might make sense to place all the punctuation a bit closer to the home row for programmer keyboards.
dzuc 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
user5994461 9y ago
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.
- sho 9y ago
  Your list makes no sense to me. PostgreSQL is a poor product with noticeably superior competitors? This is - how should I put it? - a niche opinion. And besides, popularity is its own quality sometimes. NPM might not be the "best" but everything's on it so it's the most useful. A lot of devops people already know docker. If you need to hire, there's a deep pool to draw from. That counts for a lot.
  - user5994461 9y ago
    Obviously, the list doesn't make sense unless you know the products mentioned and their competitors, preferably with a bit the history over the last decade(s). The only thing all the products mentioned have in common is that they are free to use, as-in no upfront money. There are pools to hire for any software. First, the hype is cyclical, people who worked long enough will know multiple products. Second, new comers won't know anything so they will need to be trained anyway.
  - jandrese 9y ago
    I'm guessing he's referring to Oracle as the competitor.
    - sho 9y ago
      Well that's unexpected! I'm aware that Oracle has a few features pg doesn't, and replication is supposed to be easier, but at extraordinary cost and with the added bonus of supporting one of the worst companies in tech. I don't really think you can even compare them as they serve totally different markets. If I was the CTO at a Fortune 500 and needed a DB for my new global logistics system, fine, Oracle would be in the running. Since this is HN though, I was thinking in terms of startups - and a startup choosing Oracle would be pure insanity unless they had an amazingly good reason.
CM30 9y ago
It depends what you mean by superior. If you mean superior in a technical sense (which unfortunately seems to be all a lot of startups and engineers focus on), then obviously there are tons of instances where 'superior' alternatives fail to catch on, simply because the 'superior' alternatives lack the non technical benefits of the older products or services. Like how a new social network might be more decentralised and censorship resiliant than Facebook, but lack the community/userbase that makes Facebook valuable to begin with. Or how a CMS system might be better coded than WordPress, but have a UI that people find more awkward to use (or an install process that's overly tedious/annoying for non technical folk). In that sense, a lot of superior alternatives fail to catch on simply because for all the 'objective' improvements they make, they just don't do what people need them to actually do. A community site or social network doesn't need the best codebase possible, a long laundry list of features or a censorship resistent setup, it needs a big enough community/userbase to get people invested in it. Of course, even when all factors do line up... well, that doesn't exactly guarantee the alternative with succeed either. People aren't robots, and don't choose every action to be as rational as possible. The difference between two competitors can just as easily come down to pure luck, some perceived emotional connection, timing or anything else, not necessarily the quality of the product or organisation behind it.
launchtomorrow 9y ago
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 years later once they could invest into removing their technical debt. In contrast, Amiga died a slow and painful death because of mismanagement and owner squabbles, even though they were used for much more than home gaming (real time TV station visuals) even into the early naughties. They were just much better than the alternatives. And ahead of its time as a technical platform and home PC.
- azernik 9y ago
  Also because Microsoft made the right decision for business customers when it came to backwards compatibility.
  - scholia 9y ago
    Also because Microsoft licensed the OS to hundreds of PC clone manufacturers. Amiga was a closed proprietary system.
- mannykannot 9y ago
  The importance of the selection of Microsoft to provide the operating system for the IBM PC cannot be overemphasized. It was not the only thing that made Microsoft what it became (the decision to make Windows for PC-compatible computers, and to make decent business applications for it, were critical), but without the first step, it probably would not have been in a position to do what followed. There is also path-dependence in IBM's decision to make the PC architecture open (as an attempt to grow it quickly despite being late to the party), which is what made Windows possible.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    You touch on something that's a very important point: path dependence. There are a ton of both de jure and de facto technology standards that we are locked into at some level because they gained dominance at one point because of some combination of tech, marketing, industry dynamics, and more. Once Ethernet, USB, x86, or whatever gets established it's hard to kick it out for something else that is locally better. This has become increasingly the case in much of the tech sector because of the increased importance of interoperability , ecosystems, and network effects. Conversely, you do see fairly rapid switching aware from online properties that aren't sticky because something new and shiny has come along.
afpx 9y ago
I recommend that people take a look at “Diffusion of Innovations” Rodgers 1962 and all of the subsequent work since. It doesn’t directly address usability and design, which I believe are also important, but it addresses it indirectly. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations
aaavl2821 9y ago
There is a drug used to treat a form of eye disease that causes blindness. The product, eylea, has dominated the market despite (until recently) having no evidence that it improves vision vs the competition, provides no significant improvement on other relevant clinical endpoints, had no major safety benefit, and it is priced at a comparable or higher level than all competitors A development stage product had shown better potential for vision improvement without major safety concerns, but when I interviewed physicians to ask whether they'd still prescribe eylea if this "better" drug was approved. They unanimously, without hesitation, said they'd prescribe eylea Why would doctors treat eye disease with a product that does a worse job of treating eye disease? Why would patients accept a treatment that does not optimally restore their vision? There was nothing in the clinical literature to suggest this made sense. This must be a case of a large, established pharma company playing dirty, maybe bribing doctors or brainwashing patients with tv ads The reality is that eylea required fewer doses than the competing products. For this drug, dosage means injection in the eye with a big needle. Further, physicians don't get paid more for doing an additional dose, so for them it's lost revenue. Turns out the incremental vision improvement does not offset the benefits of less frequent dosing Getting this insight is not a feat of data analysis or scientific brilliance, but simply talking to customers. And getting this right, in this case, means winning a $4-5 billion market
VladimirGolovin 9y ago
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 version of the color scheme system was "clearly superior": it offered a lot more possibilities for assigning color schemes to meshes, but it needed about 80 color values for each color scheme. The second version of the same system was "clearly inferior" -- just 28 color values, and much less creative control over the resulting look of the level. Guess which system was adopted? Right, the second, simple one. Despite offering less creative possibilities, the second system was smaller and thus could fit more easily into artists's heads, which produced better-looking results overall. To sum up, "superior" is multidimensional. Dvorak can offer better typing speed, but it offers much less "habit compatibility" with existing keyboards in the real world, and thus is a worse time investment. Or, Haskell offers much better maintainability, refactorability and reliability, but dynamic languages offer faster time-to-market and easier-to-hire coders.
- snuxoll 9y ago
  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).
mathgeek 9y ago
> It is often said that birds have far superior lungs than mammals. So mammals are failures compared to birds… I've never heard this argument once in my life, and Google doesn't come up with too much discussion on it beyond a few articles discussing the differences. This point struck me as a bit of a stretch, and the blog post itself is probably stronger without it.
hyolaris 9y ago
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.
Proven 9y ago
They aren’t superior
tw1010 9y ago
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.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
timthelion 9y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-ninety_rule
btilly 9y ago
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 https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html for a famous essay about the difference between what makes software good versus readily adopted.
- nayuki 9y ago
  Is Esperanto really easier to learn than English? I'm basing on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Grammar 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.
  - btilly 9y ago
    For years the lingua franca was French. (In fact lingua franca is an Italian phrase meaning "French language".) And based on experience, I believe that French is easier to learn. The transition to English only happened after the British Empire became economically and politically dominant. It retained its importance because as England declined, the USA became one of the two world superpowers. The big win of English is not that it is easy to learn. We often have parallel words for the same thing (eg earth vs dirt). Words that would be related in any other language aren't (eg cow vs beef). Attempt to read http://www.i18nguy.com/chaos.html http://www.i18nguy.com/chaos.html aloud if you need further convincing. The big win is that the people you most want to talk to already speak it.
stretchwithme 9y ago
I remember OS/2 was allegedly superior To Windows 95. But it failed because there were far fewer applications for it. IBM had to to pay Netscape to finally port their browser to it. I used to say OS/2 was HALF an OS, as it was missing a very important half of the equation; all those annoying applications. Plus I could never get it to stay installed on an IBM PC. I did it once, but never could do it a second time. So that third half of the equation was pretty weak too.

111 points by deafcalculus 9y ago

Often, because in the calculation of the provider, one factor never appears. Training-time, if a superior tool comes along, making it necessary to retrain to do the same work, its not superior, its inferior until the gain is so big that the productivity loss is visible to the customer. That is why even with superior software it is necessary to add a "Legacy"-user interface, that allows for a easy switch from old software, while at the same time retraining people to use the new interface. This changes the transition costs.

Gravityloss 9y ago

Excellent post. It's short and doesn't waffle. It has a coherent idea and at least I learned something new.

Rainymood 9y ago
Personally, if I may be crude, found the post to be too short and unsubstantiated. I can honestly not imagine this is a "serious" post by a professor (!). It's so short-sighted I don't even know where to begin. My personal opinion is that "superior" often means "cheap as shit and I'm willing to compromise a lot of stuff".

raverbashing 9y ago

I agree "Superior" has to be followed by: "superior to whom?" and "superior in what aspect?" "X is better than Y" but X does not do what Y does then it's not superior if it won't solve a problem.

jondubois 9y ago

I do think that superior alternatives will catch up eventually if they stay in the game long enough... The problem is that sometimes the window of opportunity can be suppressed for very long periods of time; sometimes several generations... Maybe even several centuries. Great one-time success can create a protective buffer which allows inferior traits to persist through long periods of time.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

badsectoracula 9y ago

While i agree with the sentiment that the supposedly superior product isn't actually that superior all the time, the given examples are a bit cherrypicking-ish. For example the BetaMax vs VHS comparison is about image quality, not length (and FWIW BetaMax could record 2 hours, but it is true that VHS thanks to its size could record more than that). Similarly the mammals vs birds comparison feels a bit stretchy - like calling a tomato salad a "fruit salad" because tomato is technically a fruit.

hyperpallium 9y ago

When there's a new, far superior way of doing things, it always catches on. But usually there are several different versions of this new way, with slightly different properties, trade-offs and non-product features (like marketing, support, compatibility, price etc) - which of these wins out is a crap-shoot. That's why some companies, investors and customers back different versions... and the pragmatic ones wait for a market leader to emerge.

eggie 9y ago

It's true that there isn't necessarily much difference in typing speed between QWERTY and Dvorak layouts, for trained typists (even the same typist). However, we might say that we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater when we claim that Dvorak is technically not superior because weak studies showed little to no marginal improvement in a few particular metrics. Modern work is a marathon of text entry, and in light of this I believe that what is technically important about a keyboard in the long run is not speed or even accuracy, but ergonomics. I won't make any general claims, because it seems like it's never been possible to study, but as an anecdote I can offer my own experience. I used to type on QWERTY until I had to stop due to repetitive strain. In the fifteen years since I switched to Dvorak I have never had a single day when I finished work feeling any pain in my hands, whereas this was almost an every-day occurrence with QWERTY. I can type for hours without stopping, without pain. The design of the keyboard makes it pleasurable to type in English. Words roll off the fingers of both hands in relaxing patterns. My hands move very little. It's nice, and I would suggest it as an option to anyone who types or programs a lot and is having trouble with their hands, not because I have any financial or personal stake in it, but because it really helped me and I care about the health of my fellow tech workers. I have seen a lot of people taken down by their hands, and I have also seen many people try some crazy gimmicks. In the same space, not considering the placement of the letters on the keyboard, there is an even more absurd technical anachronism embedded in almost every single keyboard on the market, including virtual ones on our phones. The keys are positioned not in clean vertical rows, but offset as if they have mechanical arms behind them. This is pure path dependence, and there is no conceivable reason why we are stuck with it thirty years after mechanical typewriters fell out of use except that those who learned on a mechanical typewriter couldn't even imagine to design or test a different positioning of the keys. It's not just the weird zig-zag pattern of the position of the keys that is anachronistic. Why should the backspace and delete keys (which are so essential when we are typing in the flexible medium of digital text) be relegated to the far corner of the keyboard? (TypeMatrix presents an example of a modern reconceptualization of the layout. I'm not affiliated but I do enjoy their products.) To summarize, I think that this article presents a rather limited (and even ad hominem) attack on the keyboard issue, with acknowledgment but little appreciation of the degree of path dependency in tech development. How can Dvorak be better if the research was flawed? This is not a complete answer. Of course we are going to end up in suboptimal equilibriums, and together we should appreciate this if we ever want to get out of them.

jasode 9y ago

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.g. I never understood why bicycles didn't beat out cars. Bicycles are obviously superior because: + narrow profile can squeeze through tight alleys or even heavily treed forests that cars can reach + requires no fossil fuel that emits pollution + costs less than 1/100th the price of a car + easily repaired by homeowners in the garage because no computers + etc, etc That fixation on those attributes causes the confused person to totally miss the other positive attributes of the car: + travel faster than 25 mph with minimum physical exertion + typical size car can carry 5 adults which is ~1000 pounds of weight + carry entire week's worth of groceries (~10 bags) + occupants don't get wet when when it rains If one doesn't understand the all the multidimensions of qualities and weigh them in an objective manner that's detached from personal preferences, he'll always be confused why "superior" USENET lost to "inferior" Reddit, or why "superior" Lisp lost the popularity contest to "inferior" C++/Java/Python/Go/etc, or why Mac OS 9 lost to Windows NT. Likewise, there were multidimensional factors to Betamax vs VHS and "picture quality" was only one of them.

baddox 9y ago
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 still important to recognize that a variant might “win” because of factors completely unrelated to its “fitness,” like an organization using its market power in an unrelated sector to promote its variant, or even just good old fashioned dumb luck.
- doiwin 9y ago
  So how do we decide if qwerty or dvorak is fitter?

joeblau 9y ago

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.

jsjohnst 9y ago
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_of_high_definition_optical_disc_formats https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_high_definitio...
- Dylan16807 9y ago
  Agreed, HD DVD was the cheaper and technologically inferior option.

ilaksh 9y ago

People usually do confuse popularity with merit. They are in fact, two completely different, and often fairly unrelated, characteristics. The keyboard that happens to have the most market share is the most popular one. It is not the superior one. Start with the example of the top ten most popular pieces of music at the time. Do we generally conclude that these are the most meritorious musical compositions of the moment? Or are they popular because they happen to be catchy, or just raunchy enough to play on our base desires but not enough to be censored, or because the distributor has a deal to continuously play the song on the radio? QWERTY is still popular mainly just because of momentum. At the time it came out many decades ago, it had some nice utility. But clearly the core idea of slowing down typing became outdated long ago. But when it comes down to it, learning a new keyboard is not easy. To switch to a new way of doing things does not depend on having a better way. I believe it depends on some type of social networking effects and chance. For example, if several celebrities suddenly decide to create a Twitter campaign about the evils of QWERTY and incredible qualities of DVORAK, then it for some reason came standard in a new hot electronic device that happened to be trendy among teenagers, perhaps we would see a significant market switch. This is one thing that I have noticed about some posts on HN. People will come on and say that their startup failed, and then come up with a list of rationalizations blaming various material qualities of their product or service. In most cases I believe this is quite an incorrect interpretation of events. They usually have a perfectly good or often superior product, which simply did not catch on. So I think that things like marketing are quite key to becoming popular, but again, being popular or not doesn't substantiate or unsubstantiate the quality of the product.

dozzie 9y ago
> QWERTY [...] the core idea of slowing down typing became outdated long ago. And even back then it wasn't true. QWERTY keyboard was not designed to slow typist down, it was designed so letters that follow each other most often were as far on the hammer row (and thus on the keyboard) as possible.
taneq 9y ago
> But clearly the core idea of slowing down typing became outdated long ago. The qwerty layout was designed to minimise jams, not to "slow down typing".

jstewartmobile 9y ago

Whether it's a computer or a bar of soap, most things have so many aspects that even the experts can't agree, so A) All the damn time.

codingdave 9y ago

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 market, or better tech support, or better sales and marketing -- in other words, the business quality beats out technical problems. Ideally, you'd have high quality in both areas, but that isn't reality in most organizations.

Certhas 9y ago
If quality is defined by success, the question whether superior alternatives ever lose out becomes trivial. They can't, by definition. And now you've made it harder to discuss market failures and similar ideas, because you've eliminated some words that could intuitively be used to describe a useful distinction.
- blowski 9y ago
  The problem is that people want market success to be a consequence of engineering quality. But a lot of people are interested in a lot more than engineering quality. So the products with the best code don’t necessarily make the most money. You could ask “why do some attractive people marry ugly people?”. It’s because your reasons for choosing something are not necessarily the same as somebody else’s.
baddox 9y ago
But you’re dangerously close there to having no predictive power. Business folk may rightly judge a product by its market success, but some business folk need to decide where to invest resources in building new products. Hindsight is 20/20, and of course products that are widely viewed as having poor engineering quality can succeed and even dominate a market, for a variety of reasons. But that doesn’t provide much evidence to support the claim that, when developing a new product, engineering quality doesn’t matter. Sure, we can take the fatalistic view that new product development is an unguided process like biological evolution, where we will only know which random mutations were successful when we observe their prominence many generations down the line. But clearly most people act as if they believe they can do better than uniform random (i.e. investors generally don’t invest the exact same amount in every new company or product they can find).

ddmma 9y ago

The tipping point by Malcom Gladwell might have an extensive answer on this matter and is similar effect to epidemics.

k__ 9y ago

Professionality? You can basically ship crap if you do it professionally.

anotheryou 9y ago

UI has the big problem of power vs casual/noob user and everyone stars as a noob. There are good compromises, usually the power-user tool is hard to get in to and more efficient. Similar for switching away from QWERTZ.

chiefalchemist 9y ago

Why? Because context matters. That is, for example, just because BetaMax had a superior Feature X doesn't mean that Feature X matters to enough people. That feature exists in a broader expectations + wants + needs "eco-system." That momentum can be very difficult to redirect once it gets rolling. Yes, a unique / superior feature _might_ be what wins you the market but it's not always that simple.

zimbatm 9y ago

For programmers, QWERTY is actually superior to DVORAK in my opinion. The US keyboard variant more specifically as most language designs have been influenced by how reachable each punctuation is to that specific layout. And with auto-complete, the alphabet placement is not that important. Actually if we were to rethink the keyboard based on the frequency of usage, it might make sense to place all the punctuation a bit closer to the home row for programmer keyboards.

dzuc 9y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

user5994461 9y ago

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.

sho 9y ago
Your list makes no sense to me. PostgreSQL is a poor product with noticeably superior competitors? This is - how should I put it? - a niche opinion. And besides, popularity is its own quality sometimes. NPM might not be the "best" but everything's on it so it's the most useful. A lot of devops people already know docker. If you need to hire, there's a deep pool to draw from. That counts for a lot.
- user5994461 9y ago
  Obviously, the list doesn't make sense unless you know the products mentioned and their competitors, preferably with a bit the history over the last decade(s). The only thing all the products mentioned have in common is that they are free to use, as-in no upfront money. There are pools to hire for any software. First, the hype is cyclical, people who worked long enough will know multiple products. Second, new comers won't know anything so they will need to be trained anyway.
- jandrese 9y ago
  I'm guessing he's referring to Oracle as the competitor.
  - sho 9y ago
    Well that's unexpected! I'm aware that Oracle has a few features pg doesn't, and replication is supposed to be easier, but at extraordinary cost and with the added bonus of supporting one of the worst companies in tech. I don't really think you can even compare them as they serve totally different markets. If I was the CTO at a Fortune 500 and needed a DB for my new global logistics system, fine, Oracle would be in the running. Since this is HN though, I was thinking in terms of startups - and a startup choosing Oracle would be pure insanity unless they had an amazingly good reason.

CM30 9y ago

It depends what you mean by superior. If you mean superior in a technical sense (which unfortunately seems to be all a lot of startups and engineers focus on), then obviously there are tons of instances where 'superior' alternatives fail to catch on, simply because the 'superior' alternatives lack the non technical benefits of the older products or services. Like how a new social network might be more decentralised and censorship resiliant than Facebook, but lack the community/userbase that makes Facebook valuable to begin with. Or how a CMS system might be better coded than WordPress, but have a UI that people find more awkward to use (or an install process that's overly tedious/annoying for non technical folk). In that sense, a lot of superior alternatives fail to catch on simply because for all the 'objective' improvements they make, they just don't do what people need them to actually do. A community site or social network doesn't need the best codebase possible, a long laundry list of features or a censorship resistent setup, it needs a big enough community/userbase to get people invested in it. Of course, even when all factors do line up... well, that doesn't exactly guarantee the alternative with succeed either. People aren't robots, and don't choose every action to be as rational as possible. The difference between two competitors can just as easily come down to pure luck, some perceived emotional connection, timing or anything else, not necessarily the quality of the product or organisation behind it.

launchtomorrow 9y ago

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 years later once they could invest into removing their technical debt. In contrast, Amiga died a slow and painful death because of mismanagement and owner squabbles, even though they were used for much more than home gaming (real time TV station visuals) even into the early naughties. They were just much better than the alternatives. And ahead of its time as a technical platform and home PC.

azernik 9y ago
Also because Microsoft made the right decision for business customers when it came to backwards compatibility.
- scholia 9y ago
  Also because Microsoft licensed the OS to hundreds of PC clone manufacturers. Amiga was a closed proprietary system.
mannykannot 9y ago
The importance of the selection of Microsoft to provide the operating system for the IBM PC cannot be overemphasized. It was not the only thing that made Microsoft what it became (the decision to make Windows for PC-compatible computers, and to make decent business applications for it, were critical), but without the first step, it probably would not have been in a position to do what followed. There is also path-dependence in IBM's decision to make the PC architecture open (as an attempt to grow it quickly despite being late to the party), which is what made Windows possible.
- ghaff 9y ago
  You touch on something that's a very important point: path dependence. There are a ton of both de jure and de facto technology standards that we are locked into at some level because they gained dominance at one point because of some combination of tech, marketing, industry dynamics, and more. Once Ethernet, USB, x86, or whatever gets established it's hard to kick it out for something else that is locally better. This has become increasingly the case in much of the tech sector because of the increased importance of interoperability , ecosystems, and network effects. Conversely, you do see fairly rapid switching aware from online properties that aren't sticky because something new and shiny has come along.

afpx 9y ago

I recommend that people take a look at “Diffusion of Innovations” Rodgers 1962 and all of the subsequent work since. It doesn’t directly address usability and design, which I believe are also important, but it addresses it indirectly. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations

aaavl2821 9y ago

There is a drug used to treat a form of eye disease that causes blindness. The product, eylea, has dominated the market despite (until recently) having no evidence that it improves vision vs the competition, provides no significant improvement on other relevant clinical endpoints, had no major safety benefit, and it is priced at a comparable or higher level than all competitors A development stage product had shown better potential for vision improvement without major safety concerns, but when I interviewed physicians to ask whether they'd still prescribe eylea if this "better" drug was approved. They unanimously, without hesitation, said they'd prescribe eylea Why would doctors treat eye disease with a product that does a worse job of treating eye disease? Why would patients accept a treatment that does not optimally restore their vision? There was nothing in the clinical literature to suggest this made sense. This must be a case of a large, established pharma company playing dirty, maybe bribing doctors or brainwashing patients with tv ads The reality is that eylea required fewer doses than the competing products. For this drug, dosage means injection in the eye with a big needle. Further, physicians don't get paid more for doing an additional dose, so for them it's lost revenue. Turns out the incremental vision improvement does not offset the benefits of less frequent dosing Getting this insight is not a feat of data analysis or scientific brilliance, but simply talking to customers. And getting this right, in this case, means winning a $4-5 billion market

VladimirGolovin 9y ago

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 version of the color scheme system was "clearly superior": it offered a lot more possibilities for assigning color schemes to meshes, but it needed about 80 color values for each color scheme. The second version of the same system was "clearly inferior" -- just 28 color values, and much less creative control over the resulting look of the level. Guess which system was adopted? Right, the second, simple one. Despite offering less creative possibilities, the second system was smaller and thus could fit more easily into artists's heads, which produced better-looking results overall. To sum up, "superior" is multidimensional. Dvorak can offer better typing speed, but it offers much less "habit compatibility" with existing keyboards in the real world, and thus is a worse time investment. Or, Haskell offers much better maintainability, refactorability and reliability, but dynamic languages offer faster time-to-market and easier-to-hire coders.

snuxoll 9y ago
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).

mathgeek 9y ago

> It is often said that birds have far superior lungs than mammals. So mammals are failures compared to birds… I've never heard this argument once in my life, and Google doesn't come up with too much discussion on it beyond a few articles discussing the differences. This point struck me as a bit of a stretch, and the blog post itself is probably stronger without it.

hyolaris 9y ago

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.

Proven 9y ago

They aren’t superior

tw1010 9y ago

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.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

timthelion 9y ago

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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-ninety_rule

btilly 9y ago

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

nayuki 9y ago
Is Esperanto really easier to learn than English? I'm basing on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Grammar 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.
- btilly 9y ago
  For years the lingua franca was French. (In fact lingua franca is an Italian phrase meaning "French language".) And based on experience, I believe that French is easier to learn. The transition to English only happened after the British Empire became economically and politically dominant. It retained its importance because as England declined, the USA became one of the two world superpowers. The big win of English is not that it is easy to learn. We often have parallel words for the same thing (eg earth vs dirt). Words that would be related in any other language aren't (eg cow vs beef). Attempt to read http://www.i18nguy.com/chaos.html http://www.i18nguy.com/chaos.html aloud if you need further convincing. The big win is that the people you most want to talk to already speak it.

stretchwithme 9y ago

I remember OS/2 was allegedly superior To Windows 95. But it failed because there were far fewer applications for it. IBM had to to pay Netscape to finally port their browser to it. I used to say OS/2 was HALF an OS, as it was missing a very important half of the equation; all those annoying applications. Plus I could never get it to stay installed on an IBM PC. I did it once, but never could do it a second time. So that third half of the equation was pretty weak too.