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This is not just about keyboard layouts. It's about the concept the poor products (VHS, Windows) win over superior products (Beta, Mac) because of a winner tak

This is not just about keyboard layouts. It's about the concept the poor products (VHS, Windows) win over superior products (Beta, Mac) because of a winner take all economy. As you can guess the author shows this to be bunk science.

davidw 18y ago
What they are afraid of is the idea of the free market not always and in every case producing the best possible result, so they need to aggressively attempt to demonstrate that 1) either market failure just doesn't exist, as they attempt to show here, or 2) that in no case, ever, will government intervention improve the situation, which is the topic of other libertarian writing. In other words, this is just another episode of "Libertarians vs Socialists": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=419503 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=419503 For a serious treatment of the economics of digital goods and networked economies, I think Varian and Shapiro are a better read: http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/7/information-rules-a-strategic-guide-to-the-network-economy http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/7/information-rules-a... (Edit: to be fair, it turns out the authors have a more scholarly treatment of the subject matter, which is a better read: http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/harvj/harvard.html http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/harvj/harvard.html Still though, I think it's pretty clear that they're coming from a point of view, and "backfilling" to try and get there)
twopoint718 18y ago
It would be interesting to construct an experiment to see what kinds optimal solution a free market can and can't find (though I have no idea how this would be done). In search algorithms you have to worry about merely finding a local maxima rather than a global maximum. In algorithms such as simulated annealing you perturb your solution randomly at the outset, trying to "bump" your solution off of one of those local maxima. What if the free market is prone to getting "stuck" in some locally optimal, globally sub-optimal solution? Depending on initial conditions (price, number of firms in the marketplace, demand, etc.) we could end up with great solutions, but in others with terrible results.

davidw 18y ago

What they are afraid of is the idea of the free market not always and in every case producing the best possible result, so they need to aggressively attempt to demonstrate that 1) either market failure just doesn't exist, as they attempt to show here, or 2) that in no case, ever, will government intervention improve the situation, which is the topic of other libertarian writing. In other words, this is just another episode of "Libertarians vs Socialists": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=419503 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=419503 For a serious treatment of the economics of digital goods and networked economies, I think Varian and Shapiro are a better read: http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/7/information-rules-a-strategic-guide-to-the-network-economy http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/7/information-rules-a... (Edit: to be fair, it turns out the authors have a more scholarly treatment of the subject matter, which is a better read: http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/harvj/harvard.html http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/harvj/harvard.html Still though, I think it's pretty clear that they're coming from a point of view, and "backfilling" to try and get there)

twopoint718 18y ago

It would be interesting to construct an experiment to see what kinds optimal solution a free market can and can't find (though I have no idea how this would be done). In search algorithms you have to worry about merely finding a local maxima rather than a global maximum. In algorithms such as simulated annealing you perturb your solution randomly at the outset, trying to "bump" your solution off of one of those local maxima. What if the free market is prone to getting "stuck" in some locally optimal, globally sub-optimal solution? Depending on initial conditions (price, number of firms in the marketplace, demand, etc.) we could end up with great solutions, but in others with terrible results.