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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. |