I don't think it's a market failure to punt on a hard problem. The problem being, in this case, finding a satisfactory way to switch people to an intrinsically

I don't think it's a market failure to punt on a hard problem. The problem being, in this case, finding a satisfactory way to switch people to an intrinsically superior way of doing things. Simply forcing everyone to do it is not satisfactory, because the new way might very well not be superior (and because you'd be trampling on many people's rights, by definition of "forcing"). (Imagine what would happen if the government decided they were going to figure out once and for all which operating system was the best, and make everyone switch to it. And then, halfway through the process, new and drastically improved versions of each of the operating systems come out, and now a different one is superior.) Another alternative would have been "prevent any keyboard layout from becoming widely used before "we" figure out which is best", which is also unsatisfactory. I don't believe in market failures, and I think Dvorak is superior and have been using it for a few years. This doesn't contradict what you said, though, because, whether or not it would be a market failure, these people you mention certainly think it would be.