Ask HN: What are examples of technology “lotteries”?

[BayezLyfe]

Let's define "technology lottery" as an idea/concept/invention/innovation that wins out not because of technological superiority, but rather due to fortuitous circumstances relative to alternative directions. One example could be AC vs DC electricity [1], another could be the invention of gas vs electric cars [2]. What are more examples of technology lotteries?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_currents

[2] https://wisdombiscuits.com/which-came-first-the-electric-car-or-the-gasoline-car/

[gus_massa]

The AC won because it is easier to build AC transformers, it is not a lottery. (The 50 vs 60 Hz is a lottery, though.)

[fiftyacorn]

The current war is quite a good film about this

[gitgud]

To turn the question around, it's actually much rarer for something to win out for purely technological superiority.

Any tech relies on many factors to gain popularity and majority share. Simplicity, ergonomics, community, cost, marketing, compatibility...

Many of these factors are more important to success than whether the product is technologically superior...

[endisneigh]

Git vs other version control systems

[jonas_kgomo]

Actually the term is defined in a Google article called hardware lotteries[0], describing software theories that make it because of existing hardware.

[0] https://hardwarelottery.github.io/

[boltzmannbrain]

Great writeup. The definition here is a bit different and more general.

[PaulHoule]

Bezier curves in computer graphics.

[boltzmannbrain]

What are the alternatives that didn't win out?

[PaulHoule]

NURBS for one thing.

[mimixco]

Thank you for this! I had never heard of these and I hate Bezier curves. I can never figure out how to manipulate them. The history in this Wikipedia article is fascinating, too, and how "splines" came to be from wood models. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-uniform_rational_B-spline

[Someone]

Within Bézier, there’s cubic (postscript, Adobe type 1) and quadratic (TrueType, Apple’s long dead QuickDraw GX). I think the relation between control points and curve shapes is easier to understand for quadratic ones (and, of course, still easier for linear Bézier curves, aka “line segments”)

For fonts, I think we still live in a mixed world that’s very slowly moving towards TrueType. For 2D graphics, PDF with its cubic Bézier curves has a bit of an edge. Overall, I don’t see a clear winner.

Because of that, some graphics APIs support both. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coregraphics/cgmut..., for example, has addCurve to add a cubic, and addQuadCurve to add a quadratic Bézier curve to a path.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.drawing.g... only does cubic Bézier curves, I think, but https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.drawing.g... supports TrueType fonts, so the code can draw quadratic Bézier curves.

[frompdx]

Film vs Digital

For many years the quality of digital images lagged behind film (in the hands of a skilled individual). Some will argue that digital still lags behind film, especially when comparing digital to medium or large format film. I will go as far as to say that even if the resolution of each is the same, the result of film is superior.

A couple of things happened in the early 2000s that made digital a serious contender to the dominance of film. First, digital sensors became cheap enough and good enough to compete with film on smaller prints. The results still looked worse, but the results were fast. Price-wise, it was still possible to shoot a lot of film for the price of a digital camera (tmax was $0.80/roll if you bought it in bulk in 2005 if I remember right). Second and most importantly social media became ubiquitous. A growing social media trend was to take a picture of yourself doing whatever it was that you were doing and post a picture soon afterwards (these days we do it right then and there thanks to smart phones). The speed at which you could post was much more important than the quality of the results. If it weren't for the popularity of social media I don't think it would have mattered nearly as much because you still would have shared your photos the old fashioned way by subjecting your friends and family to a tedious viewing of your latest vacation photos when they came to visit.

These days, sales of digital cameras has actually been falling (thanks again to the smart phone). It turns out it's the ability to share quickly regardless of quality that really matters to consumers in our current social media climate. My theory is that if social media as we know it today never became popular, film would command a larger share of the market. Film prices were competitive with digital even after digital SLRs were available at the $1000 price point. Digital lucked out for a short period of time thanks to it's speed advantage over film but was ultimately supplanted by something even faster (smart phones), quality be dammed.

Of course, I'm biased. I've always loved film. Digital had the greatest appeal to me when I had no extra money and film prices had already begun to rise in the late 2000s/early 2010s. Even today with high film prices I will from time to time wonder if it finally no longer makes financial sense to shoot film only to determine that I can shoot film for a couple of years at my pace for the price of a new digital camera. Long enough for the camera to become "obsolete". Meanwhile, my film cameras as old as my parents keep on producing wonderful images. Anyway, that's my theory on why digital was never really superior to film but won due to fortuitous circumstances (and ultimately lost).

[mimixco]

It's remarkable to think that Kodak invented the digital camera yet could not turn it into a business. Their failure to do so eventually killed their film camera business, and then their entire film business as well.

[mimixco]

VHS vs. Beta is a classic.

[tjalfi]

Betamax machines had higher picture quality but they were more expensive and tapes had much shorter recording time. I wouldn't describe this as the market selecting an inferior product.

[fiftyacorn]

What was weird when I was growing up was how Phillips video 2000 was the dominant standard in school

Probably some dept of education bought a million video 2000 VCRs for education

[mimixco]

737s vs. Everything invented since