Disproving the Qwerty effect

I still run into people who cite the “Qwerty effect” as evidence that sometimes a big head start will give an inferior technology unfair market dominance at the expense of “better” ones.  This theory has been disproven historically (it’s not true that the inventor of the typewriter deliberately mangled the layout in order to prevent keys from jamming) but it still shows up in people who cite the superiority of the Beta format over VHS (in fact, the double-length recording time of VHS made it superior, and videophiles at the time weren’t even in agreement about whether or not Beta had a quality advantage), or the superiority of <insert your favorite non-MS product> over <insert some less popular product>.  It turns out that in real life, the superior technology almost always wins.

Well, finally somebody decided to test the effect in the lab, under controlled conditions.  A new paper by Tanjim Hossain and John Morgan shows the results of experiments they did in a lab, testing inferior platforms against superior ones:

Somehow, the market always manages to solve the QWERTY problem. In sixty iterations of dynamic platform competition, our subjects never got stuck on the inferior platform—even when it enjoyed a substantial first-mover advantage. The remainder of the paper describes in detail the experiments and the results.

This is obvious to anybody who thinks critically about new technologies: often that underdog product that you think is so cool, is actually inferior to the market leader.  The flip side is that if it really is superior, you can make it into the market leader if you play your hand correctly.  The catch, of course, is the definition of “superior”:  maybe some of what you think of as “better” in your product is something the market doesn’t care about.  Go fix that first before complaining about your lack of first-mover advantage.

[ht: Marginal Revolution]