[fh]

From the article: "The fancy shmancy argument is that dominant design repels most attacks. There are lots of bad ideas that were adopted first, became dominant, and have been impossible to shake. The DVORAK vs. QWERTY keyboard debate is a canonical example. It doesn’t matter if DVORAK is actually 5x better that QWERTY, the cost of relearning is perceived to be prohibitive, so most people never have the motivation to try, and there are huge reinforcements of the status quo (e.g. people who teach typing classes). Metric system vs. English in the U.S. is another good example. A particularly retarded example of dominant design is electric plugs. Studying why the world has 50 different plugs and voltages explains much about resistance factors against innovation. Or world peace."

This is a actually a favorite nitpick of mine. I don't really buy the argument that established standards dominate even after they've been proven to be inferior. First of all, the Dvorak vs. Qwerty situation isn't as clear cut as it is commonly made out to be -- while there's lots of anecdotal evidence, the few independent studies (i.e. those not done by Dvorak himself) aren't very conclusive. At the very least they don't show a 5x improvement.

The cost of switching to the metric system likely isn't as great as commonly believed, and there's no harm in running both side-by-side for a while. There are many precedents for this from other countries. While as a European, I consider the imperial system to be clearly inferior, I think the real reason why the U.S. doesn't adopt it has more to do with emotional attachment and xenophobia than with cost. The point here is, if Americans genuinely consider the imperial system to be better, switching would not be an improvement.

The electric plug situation is rapidly improving, in part because of homogenization pressure, in part because electronic devices don't particularly care what kind of voltage you feed into them. (Be careful with adapter plugs and hairdryers though, you might start a fire if the voltage is too high.) Also, this is a case where none of the existing standards is inferior to any other, so it's not even an example of a bad design becoming dominant.

In short, my point is that if a new convention is clearly better, it's usually possible to switch gradually, and that this is usually done. The effect of "dominant design" is greatly exaggerated.

[jazzdev]

First of all, the Dvorak vs. Qwerty situation isn't as clear cut as it is commonly made out to be

Indeed. Reason Magazine did an in-depth article on this a few years back.

http://reason.com/archives/1996/06/01/typing-errors

[mortenjorck]

Unfortunately, that article isn't really so much a defense of Qwerty as it is a defense of free-market fundamentalism. The writer doesn't seem to care as much about usability as he does about attacking the credibility of as many free market-mistrusting Dvorak supporters as he can track down. Not to say that he's necessarily wrong, but the article is really only superficially about keyboards.

Ultimately, it is indeed not as clear-cut a situation as it's made out to be, either in Dvorak's or Qwerty's favor.

[billswift]

The classic disproof of the Dvorak superiority to qwerty is "The Fable of the Keys", here http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html , which was also the lead chapter in the authors' book "Losers, Winners, and Microsoft", a general attack on network (or lock-in) effects.