> "It should have been impossible to have the persistence of an inferior
> technology."
Yeah, right. Welcome to the 1990s, pal.
More of an indication that we're in some postmodern combination of 4, 5,
6a, and 6b in the FoRK mailing list lifecycle
http://xent.ics.uci.edu/FoRK-archive/feb98/0432.html
It's enough to make you want to bang on your QWERTY all day.
-- Adam
> Economists Decide to Challenge Facts of the QWERTY Story
> By LEE GOMES
> Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
>
>
> February 25, 1998
>
> Is the standard typewriter keyboard, the one used every day by tens of
> millions of people, a cruelly inferior design that we're stuck with only
> because its popularity prevents people from switching to something
> better?
>
> The question isn't as prosaic as it sounds. For economists, it bears on
> some of the critical issues of the day, such as whether free markets
> always make the best choices, or how readily the government should
> intervene in business, as the U.S. Justice Department is now trying to
> do with Microsoft Corp.
>
> Indeed, the keyboard question has now surfaced at the heart of a
> scholarly debate. Two economists have challenged conventional thinking
> about it in a new paper that is stirring up a tempest in academia and
> beyond.
>
> At issue is the standard "QWERTY" keyboard, so named for the first six
> letters on the second row of keys. The story of its origin has some
> trappings of an urban legend, and goes something like this:
>
> The keyboard was designed in the 19th century to deliberately slow down
> typists, because the earliest manual typewriters tended to jam. QWERTY
> solved this by placing frequently used letter pairs far apart. Then,
> during the 1930s, a university professor named August Dvorak devised an
> alternative keyboard that placed the most frequently used letter pairs
> in a single row. Though Dvorak insisted his keyboard was much easier to
> learn and faster to type on, nobody switched to it because QWERTY had
> such a huge head start.
>
> A version of this story made its way into scholarly discourse via a
> short but influential 1985 essay by Paul David, a Stanford University
> economist. In his paper, Prof. David cited a U.S. Navy study from the
> 1940s showing that the Dvorak keyboard was so superior that the cost of
> retraining typists from QWERTY to Dvorak could be recouped in just 10
> days. Such retraining never occurred because, in effect, the market had
> already settled on "the wrong system," wrote Prof. David, adding: "There
> are many more QWERTY worlds out there."
>
> For Prof. David and his Stanford colleague, W. Brian Arthur, the QWERTY
> case was the launching point for a new theory of economic behavior that
> challenged certain long-held verities. "In the early 1980s, standard
> neoclassical theory held that markets always chose the right
> technology," explains David A. Kirsch, of the UCLA business school. "It
> should have been impossible to have the persistence of an inferior
> technology."
>
> But rather than the slugfest of vigorous free markets, a different kind
> of economic behavior was displayed in the QWERTY story, Prof. David
> argued, one where people can get "locked into" inferior products because
> of distant and long-forgotten events.
>
> The idea was called "path dependence," after the notion that once you
> start down a certain path, it is hard to get off. Another example often
> cited by proponents was videocassette recorders, where the VHS standard
> won out over the supposedly superior Beta because of early marketplace
> maneuvering.
>
> Path dependence has since become linked to a cluster of theories said to
> describe the tendency of high-tech markets to encourage monopolies that
> may not necessarily offer the best technology. Some of Microsoft's legal
> opponents have cited the work of Profs. David and Arthur in urging
> federal action against the company. One of their arguments: Microsoft's
> head start and market penetration allowed its MS-DOS operating system to
> become the personal-computer standard despite widespread agreement about
> the superiority of Apple Computer Inc.'s Macintosh system.
>
> Meanwhile, the QWERTY story gained wide circulation among other
> economists, including Paul Krugman of Massachusetts Institute of
> Technology. In a 1994 book, Prof. Krugman predicted that "a generation
> from now, the economics of QWERTY will still be a vital part of the
> intellectual tradition."
>
> Now, though, the facts of the QWERTY story -- and some of the larger
> thinking about path dependence -- have been challenged by two
> economists, Stan Liebowitz at the University of Texas at Dallas and
> Stephen E. Margolis of North Carolina State University.
>
> They debunk the QWERTY tale, calling it largely a myth perpetuated by
> none other than Prof. Dvorak, who they say held a patent on his keyboard
> and stood to gain if it triumphed over QWERTY. The oft-cited Navy study
> was badly flawed, the professors say, and was probably conducted under
> the supervision of Prof. Dvorak himself, who died in 1975 bitter that
> the world had spurned his invention.
>
> Other more recent studies, including one by the General Services
> Administration, have shown there is little or no difference between the
> keyboards in such areas as learning ease, speed and comfort.
>
> The two critics also argue that if the Dvorak keyboard was indeed
> superior, then big corporations -- especially back in the days of huge
> typing pools -- would have grasped the long-term economic benefits of
> paying to switch over to the "better" design. What's more, while today's
> personal computers can easily be reprogrammed to the Dvorak layout, few
> people do.
>
> For Profs. Liebowitz and Margolis, both observations cast doubt on the
> Dvorak keyboard's superiority. And once that example crumbles, they
> suggest, some of the larger conclusions of path dependence also must be
> called into question.
>
> The pair also take aim at the VHS-Beta story. VHS won that battle, they
> say, because it could tape for twice as long, something consumers
> clearly wanted. Similarly, they note that DOS computers caught on
> because they were markedly less expensive than Apple's.
>
> Prof. David, who is currently doing research at Oxford University, says
> he "stands by" his original paper. He does note, however, that he hadn't
> even read the disputed Navy keyboard study before writing his article.
>
> But many other economists say they've been persuaded by Profs. Liebowitz
> and Margolis and their detective work. Among them is
> Prof. Krugman. "QWERTY is a great metaphor," the MIT economist says. But
> he concedes that evidence of being locked into a bad technology "turns
> out to be fairly weak."
>
> Prof. Arthur, now affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute, a think tank,
> says the Liebowitz-Margolis critique of the QWERTY story doesn't
> demolish the path-dependence theory. Both he and Prof. David say their
> real point was not to flog the merits of one keyboard over another, but
> rather to show that historical events have a large and unacknowledged
> role in shaping economic choices. "The issue was that these markets
> worked differently than I had been taught they did," Prof. Arthur says.
>
> Yet Prof. Liebowitz points out that the claim of path dependence that
> major, QWERTY-like inefficiencies are common "was clearly the hook that
> got everyone into the theory. If they lose that hook, they lose a lot."
>
> In fact, there is an emerging consensus among economists that the
> path-dependence school has yet to come up with the smoking gun it needs
> to show the marketplace locked into a manifestly inferior
> technology. Douglas Puffert, an economic historian who was Prof. David's
> research assistant on the QWERTY paper, says he knows of no such case
> that has been "unambiguously proven."
>
> That failure is important, because the real debate between the
> path-dependence theorists and their critics involves how well markets
> work. And on that issue, economists like Prof. Krugman are starting to
> sound like Profs. Liebowitz and Margolis in defending the vigor of free
> markets.
>
> "Really large mistakes offer profit opportunities," Prof. Krugman
> says. "If there is a really crummy technology out there that we have
> locked into, then it will be worth it for someone to pay the cost"
> involved in getting people to switch.
----
adam@cs.caltech.edu
SQWERTY, n.: Pint-sized computer keyboard specially made for children.