I've never thought of it as a market failure and certainly never framed the holy war as ultimately signaling economics beliefs. It's just a marginally lower loc

I've never thought of it as a market failure and certainly never framed the holy war as ultimately signaling economics beliefs. It's just a marginally lower local optima with a gargantuan switching cost. The benefits of having a standard layout far outweigh the costs of using a less optimal layout. On the other hand, it would take an Act of Government to make something else the standard (e.g. the DoD buying millions of Dvorak keyboards) and that is a typical symptom of market failure.