That's a good point. I'd have to give it more thought on how much predictive power we're supposed to ascribe to multiple-dimensions.
Maybe multiple dimensions is a better thinking tool for experimentation than prediction. This frees one from being paralyzed by the status quo. For example, a 1990s entrepreneur sees that the internet is becoming popular and maybe he thinks he can sell books on it. But then he goes to Barnes & Noble and sees that people are pulling real books off the shelves, taking them to the lounge chairs, and then leisurely sitting down and flipping through the pages before buying. If the dimension of "in-store experience" constrains the worldview, it will not occur to the entrepreneur that other dimensions like near-infinite selection in a "virtual bookshelf" and convenient delivery to the home will be prioritized over the store's lounge chairs. One doesn't know if those other dimensions for "book buying" matter more to buyers until he tries it.
Another well-known example of constrained single-dimensional thinking is analyzing the Blackberry vs the iPhone in 2007. Both the CEO of Research In Motion and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft were focused on the physical tactile keyboard. They saw that the iPhone obviously lacked real QWERTY buttons, so they both predicted it would flop in the marketplace. Steve Jobs' Apple team ignored the dimension that RIM & Microsoft used for criticism. Instead, they looked at the dimension of "screen size" and made it larger. The also bet on the dimension of "capacitive touch screen" which enables finger gestures. These were the dimensions that a billion smartphone buyers ultimately preferred. The Blackberry was cheaper and buyers still preferred the iPhone touchscreens.
And then you conclude abstract fitness is irrelevant anyway because everyone uses qwerty and there are:
- Advantages in everyone using more or less the same thing
- No way you're going to make everyone incur huge costs and switch
Ideally, stay out of it and let others decide for themselves.
We don't need to decide that bikes are better than cars. We ought to just support both (paved roads, traffic laws, places to keep your vehicle while you shop, etc.).
We don't need to decide that SSDs are better than disc drives. We just need to support the latest SATA standard.
So, for qwerty vs dvorak, we just need to support appropriate USB standards. And at the software level, we need to let the user customize their keys from time to time (remap hjkl in vim, remap wasd in video games, etc.).
it's pretty rare to get dedicated cyclist lanes which were created separately to the rest of the road.
it's generally created simultaneously.
This is so daunting that it feels nearly impossible, and indeed, I suspect any rigorous cost/benefit analysis would show that the benefits of any new layout (even the technically best layout) is not worth the costs of switching away from any single ubiquitous standard (even the technically worst layout imaginable), at least not in any reasonable time frame.
My guess is that the best approach is to maintain one ubiquitous standard, and change it very gradually, and to gradually reduce the costs, e.g. by implementing easy layout-switching software in major operating systems, or even bolder approaches like supporting virtualization/containerization of personal software settings and development environments in major operating systems.
What if I could just sit down at any modern networked PC, type in a URL and some authentication, and immediately be running my own exact customized computing/development environment, complete with my keyboard layout, text editor, development dependencies, etc.? That would be awesome. As long as the hardware keyboard layout is roughly compatible with my software settings (and I don’t rely on printed labels on the physical keyboard), most of the costs of choosing a keyboard layout (other than the fixed costs of learning it) go away.
Either the benefit per unit time eventually surpasses the cost per unit time (since some costs are fixed, namely the initial learning), or it doesn’t. Only switch if benefit surpasses cost in a time window you’re comfortable with.
It really bothers me actually.
I'd be curious about your statement the most people who use phones didn't learn to type. Is that for a particular age group? Alternatively, for the developing world, where phones are more common than computers? I'm having difficulty seeing the justification for the statement.
Do you believe that most people who use phones know how to type?
I would describe today's society as one in which typing is necessary for any basic tasks, and is universal, and so I don't see why smartphone users would be different from the norm in terms of typing ability. Are you using "typing" to refer only to "touch typing"?
What benefit is there to having everyone hunt and peck on a phone to keep with a convention that only really makes sense to typists?
It’s still important to recognize that a variant might “win” because of factors completely unrelated to its “fitness,” like an organization using its market power in an unrelated sector to promote its variant, or even just good old fashioned dumb luck.