Do people get stuck on QWERTY?

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I have no love for the QWERTY theory, but I’m a bit puzzled by this paper. The argument for the QWERTY capture is that you build up a skill set learning QWERTY and this keeps you using it in the future. In this paper, I can’t see any learning advantage to knowing the earlier platform, the only difference is in terms of money.

Jason (at 9:47:24 am), I think Curt was reacting against, was Alex and the authors seeming to say (I’d have to read the paper to know for sure) that they just demonstrated the actual QWERTY keyboard is efficient. But obviously, that’s not at all what they tested (again, I haven’t read the paper).

For my own part, I always thought the claims of professional typists being able to wail on a DVORAK (or whatever) keyboard were odd. If they were true, then why didn’t temp firms and other appropriate employers pay for a limited batch of the “efficient” keyboards, that their secretaries would take around with them? Or in a big firm, why wouldn’t they have a training program for people on a secretary track? It just seemed that if the advantages were as great as its proponents claimed, somebody would figure out a way to exploit it. As Alex alludes to, you personally can use a different keyboard even if everyone else uses QWERTY.

Curt,
Which elephant? Is there evidence that QWERTY is in fact substantially inferior? (Evidence that wasn’t produced by Dvorak, I mean …)

I didn’t notice any network effect in the study. Similarly, QWERTY has no network effect — you can type an email to someone with a DVORAK keybd and they can read it and type back.

Beta/VHS, hardware platforms (e.g., Intel and compatible, OSs (e.g., Windows), applications (e.g., Word, Excel) all have network effects that dominate once a market position is established. So do human languages….

Switching costs are very, very high when your customers expect Microsoft Word documents in English. The penalty for a not-quite-perfect compatibility is a potentially devastating loss of credibility — there’s no point risking it even if Mac is better or Google-whatever is free.

OTOH, they don’t really care if you typed it on a DVORAK keybd. Yet that switch has not been made.

Can we acknowledge the dead horse on the table here? QWERTY is a bugbear for ideologues – they feel it might be a damper on the efficient market theory and so they fight it tooth and nail, often offering some really poorly designed studies that supposedly refute the advantages of Dvorak.

The whole discussion is a proxy, which makes it pointless, and there’s no point going down this rabbit hole – the ideologues are simply signaling here. It would be better to be truth-seeking, even if it offends one’s long-term political identity, folks.

The larger issue is that the keyboard sucks as an input device, and it would be better to work on improving voice and BCI. Especially BCI – there are companies now in a race to bring these to market by this summer, namely Emotiv & Neurosky.

Mindball is already in the market, but not for home use. NIA for gaming is already in mass-production and will certainly explode once connected to MS Office.

Actually, lock-ins are pretty common, and if you need a more recent example just go look at the alpha keyboard on your cellphone and bear in mind that it was designed in order to provide a mnemonic aide to remember phone numbers but is now largely used to write text messages, a task for which it is poorly designed. The main reason why this topic is not laid to rest is because far too many economists are unable to put their ideological horse blinders aside and try to understand the problem at hand rather than use it as ideological gunpowder in the “Are markets really always efficient?” culture wars. I’m inclined to say that the last useful contribution to this topic came from Schelling in 1978, when he pointed out that the QWERTY keyboard is inefficient because it requires touch typists to use the left pinky finger to type the letter A. Everything after that is simple ideology-pushing, including (but by no means restricted to) Liebowitz & Margolis’ much-heralded but really piss-poor analysis.

Lock-ins occur when the social returns of a technology shift are positive but the private returns are not large enough to warrant individual investment under a real possibility that new technology adopters will remain in the minority and thus will be excluded from the network benefits. Simply put, if a new technology offers a productivity gain Λ social and private returns are aligned and universal adoption occurs, but if it offers λ < Λ where social and private expected returns diverge even if λ > 0 and social returns from coordinated adoption would be positive. Examples for this scenario abound. The λ tends to be small in percentage terms (Liebowitz-Margolis estimated the productivity gain of DSK to be around 3-5% rather than the 15% touted by Apple and others), but a simple 3% productivity gain can quickly turn into a very large number economy-wide. If this is the only problem to be solved public incentives can be successfully used to drive universal adoption (as demonstrated by the tax-subsidy scheme created to drive adoption of unleaded fuel in the EU in the 1990s), but in a dynamic technology regime a static comparison between generation 0 and generation 1 is rarely sufficient to make efficiency statements: it is very possible that the adoption of generation 1 will in turn preclude the adoption of generation 2, etc. Iow, it is sometimes better to skip a technology generation even if it is superior to the status quo.

Oh, and regarding the experiment: I didn’t try to figure out the incentives from the payoff matrices, but the big jump in initial adoptions after the switch to the duopoly stage is a strong signal that they picked a gain close to or above Λ, while the interesting question would be which equilibria emerge if the initial rate of adoption is at 20% or lower (i.e close to λ). Another opportunity wasted.

Skimming the paper, I didn’t see whether there were significant costs to changing platforms, but that maybe because I’m not willing to switch from English to Economics Paper Jargon.

There seem to be several sorts of potential “QWERTY” problems: The keyboard problem, where switching is expensive, and switching back is expensive – returning to Sholes from Dvorak is going to cost a significant fraction of what it costs to switch in the first place. Another sort is the “standard transmission” switch – it’s expensive to switch from an automatic to a standard transmission car, but it’s not expensive to switch back. Then there’s the “browser war” case, where it’s fairly inexpensive to switch, and fairly inexpensive to switch back.

There are also probably differences depending on the circumstances of the switch – it’s expensive to switch type of car, but at some point you’re going to change cars anyway, so there’s a window of opportunity where the cost is significantly lower, while it’s always fairly cheap to change web browser.

I am surprised that people are actually debating whether or not there is such a thing as “lock-in”. Almost any data format or protocol in actual use has things in it that are never used, or flaws of some kind. This is not an open question in computer science.

If those flaws were fixed or removed, the protocol or format would be at least better. So, the “fixed” protocol is clearly the better technical solution. Why doesn’t everyone switch then? Because the costs of switching outweigh the benefits.

What these studies fail to do is to do is use a dynamic environment. Protocols and formats get adopted, but then things change. The change makes the protocol/format somewhat less than ideal, but not so much as to make it worth the cost of switching.

I was always troubled by the path dependence hyppthesis, because the logic always made sense, but the two examples always given seemed so weak, namely QWERTY and VHS. The superiority of Dvorak was never really investigated, and people seemed to confuse Beta Max (which was inappropriate for home users due to short running times) with Beta Cam, which was better than the VHS equivalent and was thus dominant. And of course the difference was redundant after just 20 years.

The best example I can think of right now isn’t even language, since we have seen plenty of switching in that over the past millenia.

It’s duodecimal time in societies with decimal number systems. Considering adopting better number systems wasn’t too hard (merchants led Europe in switching to base 10 from base 5), and the metric system has been successful with most of the world (and all of science), it seems a bit of a mystery why we are counting a duodecimal system in decimal units, and having resulting inefficiencies with one of our most important measurements.

Now there are cultural arguments about the sanctity of existing measurements, every one of which was made about imperial measurements.

There’s also a fallacy that people have about the notion of “changing time”, which occured when the American railways introduced their standardised time zones. But that was a success.

There is also the lack of a alternative I guess, except internet time.

I don’t think we can blame the lack of government, since the European adoption of base 10, American science’s use of metric units and american time zones are all good examples where it wasn’t necessary.

I guess something as major, but constantly pressing such as time has higher switching costs.

It’s duodecimal time in societies with decimal number systems

Physical measurements are not a domain for markets, they’re established by standard-setting bodies.

Jason: Nonetheless, a study reaches a conclusion, and the author must describe that conclusion.

Well, an author should honestly describe whatever conclusion their study did reach, and should not make claims that are unjustified by their study. The study is a basis for a conclusion that self-fulfilling expectations alone do not appear to produce lasting effects in their experimental design, but unless I am missing something their study does not address the possibility that there is a degree of learning beyond which lock-in happens. Therefore they are not justified in stating: “Somehow, the market always manages to solve the QWERTY problem.”

People, keep in mind that is not a stand-alone result. The QWERTY claims, in real world settings, have been refuted for almost twenty years. This is icing on the cake.

Tyler – This may not be a stand-alone result, but unless I’m missing something the paper is also not a result that adds to any evidence against the QWERTY hypothesis. The experiment does not support the claims made from it. Call me an obsessive gourmet, but I would prefer to have my cake uniced rather than covered with icing of this poor a quality. And, I strongly suspect that if a baker uses bad icing on a good cake, they will put off buyers far more than if they used no icing on the cake at all.

Putting aside the actual efficiency of a QWERTY vs. DVORAK,
A) It is costly for an individual to switch from keyboard A to keyboard B.
B) It is costly to coordinate keyboard-switching across billions of individuals who currently use keyboard A.
C) There is an individual benefit from switching to keyboard B.
D) There is more of an individual benefit if others switch with him.
E) If the costs (A and B) exceed the benefits (C and D), the mass-switch should not and will not take place.

So what exactly is the problem?

Wouldn’t the QWERTY vs. DVORAK debate be easily remedied by, say, taking a group of 200 people who have never used computers before, splitting it into two groups and teaching them the respective keyboard layouts, and comparing their relative progress?