It really depends on what your definition of 'best' is, doesn't it?
This article seems to suggest that Apple was the better computer in 1996 while Windows was dominating. But Windows was dominating because it was the platform of choice for business users who had trained on it, built custom applications for it, and networked their offices with it. It was the best solution at the time for the customers who needed it.
Path dependence is not evidence of the market not working; just the opposite. It's evidence that products the author of this article likes better aren't necessarily as successful on the market as products most consumers know how to use.
The irony is, that Apple eventually triumphed because it invested in more intuitive design, using path dependence in its own favor. Hence their famous saying: "You already know how to use it"
It's hard to say which of two technologies is better when they're not substitutable. For example, you can't replace a gas-burning truck with a lot of carrying capacity and a long range with a small electric car with basically no carrying capacity and much shorter range. They don't do all of the same things.
You can argue that nobody needs the truck, or at least that the person you're talking to doesn't need the truck, but that's a "you're holding it wrong" or, at the extreme, a "you're living wrong" argument, and it comes down to moral arguments in the extreme case.
> The irony is, that Apple eventually triumphed because it invested in more intuitive design
The only intuitive interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
The line about the nipple should be qualified: it's currently thought that face detection is also innate.
(though, intriguingly, it's apparently unknown whether this is because recognizing faces is important specifically for babies, or because the human visual system is evolved to process that kind of thing. i.e. maybe there are other stimuli, not face-shaped, which would also intrigue babies because they push the visual system's buttons:
PCs have the advantage of an open hardware platform. Apple won in laptop and mobile where open hardware either doesn't really exist or is very hard and inferior. The shift to smaller portables leveled the playing field.
It's also important to note that Apple won in part by embracing a more open software ecosystem. OS X is Unix and inherited compatibility with a massive open source ecosystem. I predict that if Apple locks down macOS(X) like iOS and locks out this ecosystem they will once again decline, especially since both Windows and Linux have improved as desktop/laptop OSes since OS X became dominant at the high end.
I would not argue that Apple was best in the 80s or 90s. They were actually kind of overpriced, closed, and original macOS was not that great. The best of the closed PCs was probably the Amiga, but Commodore's mismanagement botched that one. If Commodore were better managed they could have survived and become Apple.
Windows and Linux still dominate larger desktop workstation machines.
Amiga was well above the offerings from Apple. Amiga had a AppleOS emmulator and the Amiga was actually faster in emmulation then on Apple's metal.
My dad's friend had a store and we had a Mac sitting next to the Amiga and he would get so mad when we would run the emmulator on Amega and compare it to the Mac OS 6.
The Amiga's analogue color (4,096) was 8 years ahead of Mac's digit color which took FOREVER to come out. I was always so frustrated that people just asumed that the Apple computer was just better for graphics back then since it was SO easy to see the difference.
My friend had this beast and we had it hooked up to a WHOLE 1 GB Hard drive. We then got a Video Toaster for our church in 1991 and gave the computer to them. They used it till 2000.
Owning the Amiga back in the 80's taught me my first lesson that it's not always the technologically superior product that wins in the marketplace.
Much more important than technological features are things like marketing, conformity, and groupthink.
The lesson was reinforced when so many developers and companies started jumping all over the earliest versions of Java, which was complete and utter garbage, and was untested, slow, and immature back then. Yet people were drooling over it.
Today's smartphones are yet another instance of this: they're slow, bloated, and spyware-infested, yet people love them.
Similar things have happened again and again, making me sometimes suspect that if the worse a technology is, the more successful it is likely to be. Worse is better indeed.
Java was slow and immature in the 90s but it was a huge step up from PHP, Perl, and ugly more closed platforms like old school ASP, Visual Basic, Powerdynamo, Cold Fusion, etc. Those really really really sucked. With Java you could write modern structured debuggable code with real tooling and have some confidence it would run in production like it did in dev.
Smart phones are disappointing in a lot of ways but they're a big improvement over J2ME flip phones, dumb phones, and PDAs.
The problem with the Amiga was AFIAK Commodore's management. They should have divested themselves of all the old stuff and doubled down on marketing and supporting Amiga. Instead they kept lots of irons in the fire, wasted a lot of money, and in the end got killed by the IBM PC platform juggernaut. I wonder if the clear superiority of their tech made them over-confident.
"Java was slow and immature in the 90s but it was a huge step up from PHP, Perl"
Perl was a mature, full-featured and very useful programming language when the earliest versions of Java rolled around. Java relied on the bloated, super slow JVM, was super buggy, and really did not add any value. The "write once, run anywhere" hype turned out to be just that. So I really don't see how it was a "huge step up" in comparison. More like a huge step down.
Nevertheless, perl is pretty much not used anymore, except for small scripts. Java still happily lives on server and inside larger projects, where the hell I would not wanted to use something like perl.
I wasn't talking about now. I was replying to api's assertion that "Java was slow and immature in the 90s but it was a huge step up from PHP, Perl...".
So that's about how Java was back then, and whether it was a "huge step up" from Perl. It wasn't.
Yes, Java improved greatly over time, and yes it's more popular now. Whether its current popularity is deserved or not is debatable, and a separate issue.
I think that's missing the forest for the trees. Java had large companies investing heavily on it, which is why it already had a JIT in version 2, whereas Perl 6 languished for a decade. People can see where the trains are going, not just where they are now.
"Today's smartphones are yet another instance of this: they're slow, bloated, and spyware-infested, yet people love them."
Slow compared to what? Both making phone call and sending text message are as fast as dumb phones used to be. The other functions like browsing or playing does not have much to compare to. Maybe some PDA somewhere is faster, but I cant make calls with it so it is irrelevant.
Customers don't care about bloat, unless it interferes with them somehow. Nor have reason to care about it. Bloat is just functions they do not use nor care about.
There is some theoretical network effect in place when it comes to phones. Even if you would make great linux or whatever phone, if I could not run my android games on it I would not want it. However, linux phone I have seen was neither fast nor impressive, so it does not really matter.
Both making phone call and sending text message are as fast as dumb phones used to be.
Not in my experience. Anything less than a new flagship model and slowdowns are not uncommon, especially when the phone is updating or syncing or whatever.
Yeah it's a classic case of projecting one's personal values onto the market. A lot of startups fail in part because they design an enthusiast product that they think will have appeal outside of enthusiasts. Because clearly it's better in every way, right? So how could people not switch to this new thing that they've never seen, take the time to learn how to use it, all for a marginal increase in efficiency, if you use it perfectly, over the incumbent product they already know that currently does the thing?
Outside of enthusiast circles companies are about psychology more than anything. Make the customer feel empowered, even if they aren't, and they'll buy your thing over the technically better option.
Cultivating an enthusiast base is very much a viable strategy toward marketing a product if you also play the rest of the game correctly. Apple products are viewed as luxury goods because of their appearance and interface, but they also had a 'cool' factor to them as a consequence of being favored by creative professionals circa 2005-2010 when the iPod and then iPhone were coming into their own. People like easy-to-use, but being one of the 'in' crowd also has a huge influence on how people adopt technology.
"The irony is, that Apple eventually triumphed because it invested in more intuitive design, using path dependence in its own favor."
And because they did a much better job at building the platform the second time around. iPhone was not just first product in its category, the App Store provided developers a way to quickly make money on the platform, in turn making the iPhone the default choice for consumers and businesses.
Jobs learned a lesson from losing to Windows, and made sure it didn't happen again.
Not disagreeing with you, but I think the underlying, bigger point of pieces like this is that there are network effects that provide dominance to products that are outsized relative to their actual quality.
That is, you might make a good case that Wintel systems in 1996 were as good as Apple products in some sense, or even somewhat better, but I think it would be difficult to argue that the difference in quality was such that it paralleled the difference in market share.
A lot of the things you mention are maybe things I think the author would say are examples of social factors that push the dominance of a product outside its objective quality. In the end, I think lots of these issues come down to semantic vagueness, but I think there's a reasonable point in there.
What people tend to forget is that ironically, Windows I think came to dominate initially because it was more open. That is, you could buy it with whatever hardware you wanted, and didn't need Apple's permission.
Apple later succeeded I think because of something more nebulous, including quality on the software side, but also an appeal to the fashion-and-status-conscious (I say this as someone typing this from a MacBook, so I don't mean that as a slight).
The bigger, more serious problem is really freedom of choice and how network effects restrict that. It's one of the reasons I'm so in favor of open standards. We could argue until we're blue in the face about what X is the higher-quality product, but in the end the thing that drives these kinds of discussion is the fact that in certain fields, once a product becomes dominant, you are obliged to use that product because of others' use.
You might like to use some obscure word processing program that meets your needs better, but if the publishers you're submitting to all require Microsoft Word for some obscure feature, you are forced to use that. If your employer requires the use of some software that's only available on Windows, you might prefer Macs or Linux, but then you are forced to spend a lot of money just to run that software. You might not want to use some messaging software, but if everyone else is using it, you often kind of have to. Even with programming languages there's something similar, where you might want to program in a language, but if everyone else is writing libraries in something else, that kind of coerces you to use that something else. That is not intrinsic to the language; it's about societal use of that language.
In some ways, it's life, but I think with tech the problems get amplified because of interactivity and communication demands. At the extreme end you end up with de facto monopolies that are impossible to get out of. In fact, I think a big case could be made that often when monopolies are established in tech, it's been open standards that have allowed for the destruction of those monopolies.
The idea of technologically superior products is a huge blind spot for engineers.
A lot of people whinge about why obviously better products fail when inferior products succeed.
Technological superiority is nice, but what you should be looking for when building products is
market superiority. The overall quality of a product is only a single factor when making a purchase.
Useability, safety, convenience, education, price, flexibility, distribution, marketing, and network effects
also contribute to the success or failure of a product.
Some common battles references of "superior" products failing are:
Betamax vs VHS:
Betamax had better image quality, but VHS had a longer runtime and was cheaper.
Consumers wanted to watch movies without switching tapes and image quality was good enough
on VHS, so it won.
High Speed Rail:
Who wouldn't want trains that travel over 250 mph? They are clearly superior to the regular trains that we
are using so why not upgrade? High speed rail's biggest competitor is not a train, it is planes. Planes have
disadvantages in terms of leaving you outside the center of a city, but they have several advantages over high
speed rail. First they have lower operating costs. You need fewer people to operate a plane and planes
fly at over 500 mph, so you need to pay less per mile per employee. Planes are safer and more flexible than high speed
rail. You can re-route a plane to any destination in the world for no additional cost. High speed rail requires very expensive
land acquisition and once the track is set it cannot be changed without additional capital. If you flex with the parameters
there are conditions where high speed rail can be price competitive with planes but it requires highly dense cities relatively close
to one another. The majority of the United States is not set up this way, so it is rational that we should not expect high speed rail.
I could go on and on, but I believe most people are rational when making purchases. You can't fool everyone forever,
so if your product is flailing look inward talk to customers and figure out how to make a market superior product instead of
a technologically superior product.
High speed rail pretty much only works in Japan and Europe for this very reason.
It does have the benefit of offering a rather relaxing travel experience compared to flying. Taking the Eurostar between Paris and London takes less than three hours, including security check and connect downtown to downtown. It sadly can't scale however.
> Later I found out that Betamax had owned the market, but lost it because Sony got one simple decision wrong. It chose to make smaller, neater tapes that lasted for an hour, whereas the VHS manufacturers used basically the same technology with a bulkier tape that lasted two hours. Instead of poring over the sound and picture quality, reviewers could simply have taken the systems home. Their spouses/children/grandparents and everybody else would quickly have told them the truth. "We're going out tonight and I want to record a movie. That Betamax tape is useless: it isn't long enough. Get rid of it."
> Betamax was the first successful consumer video format, and at one time it had close to 100% of the market. All of the video machines in use and all of the pre-recorded movies were Betamax. It had a de facto monopoly, and an element of lock-in (because of tape incompatibilities). It lost because, at the time, it could not do what consumers wanted: record a whole movie unattended. And although Betamax playing times were extended, they never caught up with VHS.
> Other elements of the oft-repeated Betamax story are also wrong. For example, while Sony was certainly slow to bring in other manufacturers, it had tried to license it to rivals such as JVC before VHS was even launched. Betamax was not generally more expensive: Sony had to slash its original high prices but generally it was competitive. Indeed, after it had lost the market, Betamax machines were often cheaper than VHS ones.
> And at the beginning, there was no comparative shortage of Betamax movies to rent: actually, they were all Betamax. (Stan Liebowitz, Professor and Associate Dean of the School of Management, University of Texas at Dallas, has done most research on this, but see urbanlegends.com for a quick guide.)
And, the most surprising thing:
> Indeed, the main thing that didn't fit was the idea was that Betamax was "technically superior". Standing in a shop at the time, there was absolutely no visible difference in picture quality, and some reviews had found that VHS's quality was superior.
I remember there was a Laserdisk standard and they made Episode 4, 5, 6 for Laserdisk that was the original cinema version before Lucas changed things to make it more family friendly, like Greedo shot first instead of Han Solo, etc. The VHS version got edited and so did the DVD versions. Laserdisk was so old it had the original released to cinemas but not the edits because they abandoned the Laserdisk format for DVD and VideoCD later on.
> So how did BluRay beat HDDVD and other standards?
BluRay won mostly nothing. But to the extent that it did win, it was mostly because it was cheaper, more reliable, and iterated faster than HDDVD.
When HDDVD disappeared people were still having problems producing the higher density disks. BluRay started as a low density format, and quickly evolved until it had more capacity than HDDVD had even even planned.
It's odd that the article mentions two or more examples for every topic (e.g. VHS vs. Betamax, English vs. Esperanto, Macintosh vs. Microsoft, gasoline vs. steam vs. electric car). But for keyboards, only QWERTY was mentioned, with an allusion to "half a dozen other keyboard layouts that are said to permit faster typing". So here are a few alternatives: Dvorak, Colemak, Arensito.
I learned to touch-type Dvorak about 5 years ago and it's been fantastic. It takes a moderate amount of commitment to become proficient, but immediately more comfortable and natural.
I began learning Dvorak in 2002, switched to it full-time since 2004, and never looked back. The full-time usage was painfully slow for the first ~2 months. After overcoming the initial hurdle, I enjoy the smooth key sequences and the higher proportion of hits on the home row. I have a longer report here: https://www.nayuki.io/page/i-type-in-dvorak
A good article. There is way more to it than a Mac vs PC debate. Path dependence is something that is worth understanding, but seldom thought of.
To his examples, I'd add these:
- The way modern computers and their operating systems are designed reflects 1960's hardware with different tiers of storage speeds for RAM and HDD. Cache and flash are now tacked on.
- The width of cars and railways is determined by the fact that they needed to use existing roads, which are as wide as two horses.
- The entire political, tax and legal system has evolved and is not optimal.
- The human body is a hack of previous organisms, made with small incremental changes. Take the spine, which in humans is structurally a tower, but most animals use as a suspension bridge.
We have to put up with systems and things that are "good enough" and all their previous versions were also "good enough".
Ease of use and a clear audience may be another reason for this. I mean, look at WordPress. It's certainly not what a lot of people would consider a great script, nor the 'best' CMS around.
However, it powers about 25% of the entire internet and 59% of all those sites using a CMS. Why?
Because it just offered what people wondered in a simple, easy to understand system rather than trying to be a super powerful jack of all trades that only tech geeks could understand. Joomla and Drupal offered more customisation options, but it was overwhelming for a lot of people, whereas WordPress just focused on being a blog and offered what was needed to run a blog straight out of the box.
And that same sort of 'simplicity sells' thing may also be part of why smartphones are doing so well recently (no messy configuration like with normal computers and very easy app installation features) as well as why games consoles still sell at a time when PCs can do everything as well or better.
people who quote adam smith appear to have never read it - AS states that people prefer to have companies in their own country and not overseas 'as if an invisible hand' were guiding them. It's literally the opening line of the @#$@#$# paragraph and it's been twisted to mean "because markets! ammiright?"
Leaving aside the content and focusing only on style, can't we agree that the internet made journalistic writing so much more dull? What an engaging piece.
This article seems to suggest that Apple was the better computer in 1996 while Windows was dominating. But Windows was dominating because it was the platform of choice for business users who had trained on it, built custom applications for it, and networked their offices with it. It was the best solution at the time for the customers who needed it.
Path dependence is not evidence of the market not working; just the opposite. It's evidence that products the author of this article likes better aren't necessarily as successful on the market as products most consumers know how to use.
The irony is, that Apple eventually triumphed because it invested in more intuitive design, using path dependence in its own favor. Hence their famous saying: "You already know how to use it"