Good ideas/innovations that lost?
One myth that surfaces in innovation history is the faith that good ideas win: if a technology, product or concept is truly better than the status quo it will eventually win because of its goodness.
Many industry veterans love to tell me how often this faith has been broken for them.
But when I ask for examples of good ideas that lost – products that should have won but were out-marketed, out-politicked, out strategized, or lost for other reasons – very few names come up.
In my innovators survey and interviews I’ve heard the same four:
- QWERTY vs. DVORAK
- Beta vs. VHS
- Windows vs. Macintosh
- U.S. Street cars vs. automobiles
Can anyone name other examples of good products, or good ideas that lost, despite being “superior” to their competitors?
It’s fine if you dont have hard evidence, I can track that down myself. (And yes, I know defining goodness is entirely subjective – I’m leaving it all up to you)
Before anyone has a seizure, I’m using the word ‘lost’ in the loosest possible sense. For example, I don’t think the Macintosh lost anything: you’d have to ask them if their goal was ever to be a market share leader. So use your own generous judgement in deciding on what ‘lost’ means.
My starter list above is a report on what people told me, not necessarily my own opinion.
Now, with that out of the way – carry on please :)
The ‘superiority’ of the DVORAK keyboard and Betamax are more myth than fact.
An excerpt from a Reason magazine article titled The New Trustbusters March ’99:
“It is an interesting idea with little empirical support, as has been demonstrated by economists Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis in the pages of REASON (“Typing Errors,” June 1996) and at greater length in the academic literature. The Dvorak typewriter keyboard was not really significantly better than the old QWERTY version, and now that anyone can go Dvorak with a computer keystroke, almost no one does. The other standard example, the triumph of VHS over Beta in videotape, is also wrong. VHS, with its longer recording time, was regarded by consumers as a better product.”
The licensing fee for Betamax was also higher so suppliers weren’t as keen to build that type of VCR.
That older article notes that the bulk of the testing that proved that the DVORAK keyboard was better than QWERTY was carried out by a man named Dvorak. Yes, he was related.
Windows vs. Mac:
The price-value equation should play a factor in deciding the ‘superior’ product. For example: it galls me to know end that the superiority of a Porsche is not recognized by all those people that (sniff, sniff) buy Toyotas.
Autos vs. Streetcars:
Haven’t thought much about this, but the ‘goodness’ of a product depends on what function it is fulfilling, and you can only say one is truly better than the other when they are close substitutes on most major axes of customer importance.
– Sean
Hi Sean: Yup. DVORAK’s data was bogus. But that still leaves room open for alternative keyboards, as even if DVORAK sucks, that doesn’t mean QWERTY doesn’t.
Actually, given your debunking tone: do you think there are any examples at all of a inferior product trumping a superior one?
Engelbart’s content / hyperlink management system vs. HTML & the world-wide-wander.
Arguably, Diesel Engines, Wankle Rotaries, and Turbines for internal combustion applications.
Let’s not forget that Xerox PARC came up with somewhere between half and all the interesting paradigms of “modern personal” computing, and made businesses out of exactly none of them.
I think the Apple Newton was . . . wait for it . . . what’s the difference between a Newton and the current “tablet PCs”, I mean aside from working better.
Oracle vs. Ingres & Informix, and arguably Nonstop SQL. Don’t even get me started about the other players. (Let the flames begin.) BTW, the hard stuff – distributed transactions, spatial data types, etc. – is still done in Boston, home of the RDB team which came along when Oracle bought RDB. That’s in ACM Queue from a couple years back.
Which brings me to VAXen. I miss my VAXen. You literally couldn’t hurt them. Bit by bit (sic) most of the stuff that made them unique and indestructible has been bleeding into the other OSes. And every time somebody makes a compromise, usually for “performance” we pay for it at run time, for the rest of our lives.
Several of these examples illustrate the maxim attributed to Henry Ford: “The first example of a superior technology is always inferior to a developed example of an inferior technology.” Also illustrate that a product doesn’t exist in isolation, generally. It exists in an ecosystem which must be ready for it, or at least ready to grow along with it. That’s one fundamental problem with alternative fuels these days – gas stations aren’t methane stations.
How about OS/2 vs. Windows 3?
Although introduced before Windows 3 it was vastly superior, at the time.
Also – Internal vs. external combustion (steam) engines for automobiles.
BTW James Bullock, re: VAXen – many of them are still happily running the largest financial institutions in the world, for example the Chicago Stock Exchange. The VMS is unbelievably reliable, some of them are not rebooted for years.
On the OS side I still sometimes miss OS/2 — it got pretty big here in Germany with the two major PC chains actually asking you if you want Windows or OS/2. Then Win95 came along which hadn’t really anything OS/2 didn’t have — except for better marketing and looks (each of them being innovative). Technically it was way worse and even in terms of compatibility with 16bit Windows it always seemed the winner.
Other names that come to mind where I must admit that I don’t really know much are DEC’s Alphas and the whole range of NeXT products (although they came back, didn’t they?).
I’d be particularly interested in non-IT examples, though. I think the IT world is too short-lived and overhyped to make for good examples.
An attempt at lateral thinking, landed me with this: Breast milk vs. Formula Milk.
Clayton Christensen has made a career out of this stuff. (http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail135.html)
15 years ago there was a race to get DOS based systems out on the market.
I would argue that Windows was not the best DOS based operating system package available. i.e. Window Base (SPI software) was far better. and faster. Microsoft Windows was better marketed and licensed.
Check out Ruth Schwartz Cohen’s “How the Refrigerator Got its Hum”. It’s an interesting story about the demise of the gas absorption refrigerator, and the success of the electric model that we use today.
It’s sounds boring, but it’s a fantastic account of marketing, big business, and emerging technology.
https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0335150268/scottberkunco-20/
Sean: the streetcar thing strikes me as short term / long term issue. In the short term it seemed great to rip them out: More room for our cars! But long term, thinking about sustainability and urban planning, streetcars and public transit make great sense.
So there is sometimes a time dimension to goodness/badness – the debates over these decisions often hinge on what timeline is being targeted by the people in power.
Becker: OS/2 has faded from my memory, but I do recall at the time of Win95 there were several window systems still around that had pockets of fans claiming various kinds of superiority.
And I agree: non-IT examples tend to work better. I have some and I’m working on finding more.
There are a few more, but haven’t fully researched these:
The Phillips screw. According to a couple of sources, The Robertson screw (square head) has most of the advantages of Phillips, but never has worn threads.
M16 – Complaints were rampant during Vietnam era, but some claim the problems were ammunition related and have been fixed. (Thanks Martin)
Here’s a provocative thought: there are no ‘losers’ who had a more innovative product.
If you haven’t figured out how your product is going to be marketed and accepted into the marketplace, you’re not solving for the complete story on how customer’s value products. I bought a non-diesel engine because it’s easier to find straight up gasoline, despite knowing I could get better gas mileage otherwise. I bought Windows over a Mac, knowing I wanted to ease of buying from a variety of re-sellers and a supporting cast of applications. There are supposedly a number of examples with Edison early in the G.E. days were he got his products accepted into the marketplace because of his ability to not only have a good enough product, but get the wider electrical system to support it.
Hi Kevin: Yup – it gets real messy once you start trying to define “good” or “should” or “better’. Assuming we’re all talking about the same level of goodness (good for me vs. good for the industry vs. good for the world) you can have these debates.
(I think) Where things get tricky is how we divide 3 things:
1) the idea itself
2) How it’s executed
3) How it’s positioned to be adopted
They’re really 3 different things, and probably 3 different skill sets. Its rare to find one person who’s crazy enough to come up with a new idea, methodical enough to engineer it, and then savvy enough to position/sell/persuade people to use it.
But when people (myself included) cry about a good idea or product that gets left behind, its probably somwhere in #2 or #3 that the failures took place – not in #1 itself. Often ideas are easy – its the other stuff thats much more difficult.
I’m not sure I agree with Sean’s line of reasoning; it’s rather close to the ex-post facto observation that since one side won, they must have been better. I suppose it’s a valid line of reasoning, but it makes any example futile.
So, Sean’s debunking notwithstanding, I would submit that slow food has lost to fast food: logistical innovation has rendered superiority in terms of health, variety, freshness, amongst others, useless.
How about memory cards, SD / MMC are becoming the standard for many manufacturers and are in most new designs. On the other hand; Memory Sticks, Compact Flash, Smart Media and xD are lagging behind, expensive and not widely supported.
I think that part of defining good innovation should be how open and flexible the idea is. If the idea is constricted, expensive and only used by one manufacturer, it could stand in the way of other new innovations.
Hi Reuven:
I’m glad to hear that there are VAXen still out there, doing what they do. FYI, there’s some Tandem / NonStop SQL underneath the NYSE as well. All the flash and glitter over the years, and when it absolutely, positively has to work, well some of the old-school systems still hold up better than the most modern stuff.
I can’t believe I forgot Atari in the litany of IT Tech That Didn’t Make It.
Corning had the most interesting corporate strategy of innovation – before the MBAs got ahold of them during the optical fiber bubble and nearly killed the entire company. They organized around two core competencies: innovation in engineered non-ferrous materials, and manufacturing automation. They’d go off inventing art and products in both of these areas, intentionally spinning up lots of “maybe” stuff.
From time to time something would hit, having a real market (Note, not “in the market” – They’d go after fundamental innovation, creating new capabilities – the guys who invent IP communications vs. the folks racing each other to grab Web 2.0 mind-share.) They’d build a line of business around the real offer – say ceramic extrusions creating cores for automobile catalytic converters – while they had an IP protected advantage. When it became a commodity market, they’d get out, moving on to the next thing which they hoped they had invented by then.
Consider how many defining products with the “Corning” name aren’t owned or run by Corning any more. “Owens-Corning Fiberglass”, for example. BTW, early on, Corning made the overwhelming majority of lightbulbs in the world – protected by patents on their unique glass molding technology.
The list of stuff that didn’t sell is, however, huge. On the other hand, when you need a window for a space shuttle, or frangible, optically precise focusing nose cones that pass IR for things that go “boom”, well, call them.
I may sound a bit like a habitual debunker or an economist that assumes that the market victor is superior by the definition that consumers are always rational, but I have truly struggled to find a good clear-cut example of ‘bad’ defeating ‘good’. Although there was that Russian wrestler that was undefeated for 14 years until he lost in the 2000 Olympics…
I thought maybe the battle between Westinghouse’s AC and Edison’s DC current could be an example, but a little research found that DC required larger transformers located in more neighborhoods. A big negative vs. power stations outside of town.
This isn’t the best example, but in the market for movies I would be hard pressed to say the biggest box office movie was consistently the best in any given year.
How about (Sir) Freddie Laker’s “Skytrain” (London-New York) vs. British Airways et al? Laker introduced the concept of cheap air travel (under $100 New York to London one-way) back in the 1970s but was put out of business in 1982 by a mix of economic recession and the tactics of the big boys that he was hurting. A classic case of the pioneer collecting all the arrows, while his successors (South West, EasyJet, Ryanair) have done very nicely out of the innovative idea he created.
Hi Tony: Interesting. I’m ignorant of the history of discount airlines (People’s air in the U.S. is the first one I can remember).
But I think this is a different kind of situation: the advantages/disadvantages of being the first mover in seperate from a good idea, or a good product, that was bested by a lesser one. Unless of course you’re suggesting that the Skytrain was designed better or had better service than those who came later?
Hi Scott: Mmmm. I disagree. What Laker Airways was offering was a revolutionary concept at the time – low cost flights, bring your own food etc. He was bested by the other airlines at the time – British Airways, Pan Am etc who engaged in a price war that in the end he couldn’t survive. Some years later Laker Airways administrators took the case to court and the other airlines were judged to have used illegal price pressure to bring Laker down. Laker’s offering was so popular that the public raised a £1 million fund for him to start again! Unfortunately the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority would not grant him a new license. So I think you can argue that Laker offered a ‘better’ product that was bested by a ‘lesser’ product – the incumbent airlines standard product (they quickly raised prices to pre-Laker levels once he’d gone).
When Laker died in February this year, both Richard Branson (Virgin Atlantic) and Stelios HajiIoannou (Easyjet) cited him as the pioneer who had inspired them. The court judgement cleared the way for them to risk another go at cheap flights – Branson even named one of his planes after Sir Freddie.
The entry for ‘Freddie Laker’ in wikipedia provides some quite good background…
I was going to suggest Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s broad gauge as it’s not used any more here in the UK, but after some googling I’ve discovered it’s actually still used a lot abroad: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broad_gauge
Still, it might be worth a mention.
Well, for the US, there’s the obvious case of the metric system. Not really a product though….
I imagine this could be difficult, as we’ve probably not heard of the products that never came close to making. Only the near-misses will be known.
I think IP issues might be a factor. What about DivX vs. MPEG4? MP3 vs. AAC (or others). Browsers? MS Word vs. TeX?
In many cases, it seems network effects and marketing play major roles. (And network effects definitely blur the question of what is ‘better’.)
In England when I was a kid wiring a new plug for my Scalextric transformer was easy, Black for Neutral (N), Red for Live (L), and Green for Earth (E). The use of Red for Live seemed sensible even to a kid since in our culture uses Red as a sign for danger and associating green with earth also seemed quite logical.
However, then along came the “superior” standard that we now have in the UK:
Blue for Neutral (N), Brown for Live (L), and Green and Yellow for Earth (E).
Brown for Live seems to have no logic at all, quite a few people I know when first wiring a plug with the new standard assumed that the brown was the Earth!. Using Green and Yellow for Earth seems very strange, surely if any of the three wires should be singled out it should have been the Live wire not the Earth. We now have a intuitively poorer solution to the problem of colour coding wires than the standard I knew as a Kid.
If it isn’t broke, don’t break it!
I’ve personally tried switching to Dvorak. In my experience it IS better layout, especially for English text.
I have given up, because:
* I couldn’t use anyone else’s computer (nobody likes me changing their settings nor installing my layouts)
* keyboard shortcuts are optimized for QUERTY and become awkward in Dvorak (like copy/cut/paste/undo).
* Windows’ “dvorak” layout is critically flawed – it differs from standard design by swapping Z with ;, and that makes it really suck for Polish (my native language) text.
When I was switching back to QUERTY I felt like I was conducting and orchestra instead of touchtyping, so there is really a difference, but Dvorak is completly impractical in todays world.
About the list: lots, lots of file formats. Matroska/OGG vs AVI, PNG vs GIF, anyting vs BMP, Vorbis/AAC/MPC vs MP3, RAR/LZX vs ZIP.
In risk of extinction: Atom vs RSS, ODF vs MS Word.
How about a lesser known battle in the RTOS field in the early to late 90s when Microware’s process-oriented OS-9 lost out Wind River’s thread oriented VxWorks?
Nowadays with embedded forms of Linux all the rage it is easy to forget that we used to pay for high quality RTOS functionality instead of grabbing it off the net.
When I started using OS-9 back in 1989 it was already very mature. I used the OS-9/68K version which, from my viewpoint, was the bedrock of the high-end industrial controls market. OS-9 didn’t have graphics but it had almost everything else; great multitasking, great inter-process memory protection, a good compiler and a reputation for robustness.
I first heard of VxWorks in early 1991 when the local WRS agent did a presentation to a group of engineers where I worked. We liked a lot of what we saw. We liked the idea of each having our own SUN workstation on our desk to use the tools. We liked the remote debugger. We didn’t like the thread-orientation and the lack of memory protection. So we passed on it.
Looking back I can see why OS-9 lost out to VxWorks. The reasons were many but are easy enought to list:
1. Tools
Microware rolled its own tools. It had its own compiler, and development team to support it. WRS used the GNU compiler and leveraged the remote debugging support in SunOS to support remote debugging. OS-9 didn’t need remote debug because its tools were often self-hosted.
The Microware compiler team came out with a really great compiler in the Ultra C compiler. It was ahead of its time and could easily be extended to support multiple processor families. It performed better than GNU in many respect yet the company never let the compiler team off the leash so they could support other OSes.
Also, to use OS-9 you had to use the Microware C tools. You could not use the GreenHills of GNU tools. This meant that choosing OS-9 meant not only choosing an RTOS but also choosing a complete tool chain. This made many prospective customers wary. It meant they were getting tied down in two different ways if they choose OS-9. With WRS it was all fast and loose. They stuck to de-facto standards (e.g. GNU) which let their customers separate the tools choice from the OS choice.
2. Marketing
Microware’s marketing was highly technical and knew what it was talking about. With WRS I always felt the shimmer of ‘spin’. Yet, WRS had better marketing. Once company websites became common, WRS one was excellent, Microware’s paled in comparison.
3. Direction
Microware had been around a long time when WRS appeared on the scene. Microware owned the high-end industrial control market but it lost it to WRS when it started focusing on the nadir of consumer electronics products.
To those of us on the outside of Microware it seemed as if Microware no longer cared about us and our problems. They were announcing trial after trial for interactive set top boxes. It all sounded exciting but it wasn’t what I, or others, were doing. We felt ignored. So it is not surprising that WRS was able to take the (highly profitable) industrial market away from Microware.
WRS ensured that all board-support-packages were advertised so that it became easy for people consider new industrial controls boards and their supported OSes. The board manufacturers gave up OS-9 in the majority of cases since WRS seemed so helpful. Of course, WRS may have been giving board manufacturers significant discounts on tools for all I know and this may have driven that behaviour.
What cannot be argued against, however, was that Microware turned its back on the market that it built its reputation upon in the mid-80s to mid-90s.
I am sure consumer electronics was far more exciting but it was hardly a cash cow.
By turning away, Microware handed an entire (high-margin) market segment to a competitor which by the late 90s was much, much larger than itself.
Today Microware is a small part of part of Radisys and Wind River Systems is trying to carve out a niche as specialists in Device Software Optimisation.
In some ways, both lost out to Linux. With the inexorable rise in processor speed in the late 90s, the ever-decreasing cost of memory and the rise of low-cost FLASH memory for permanent storage, the need for an RTOS is much reduced. WRS still exists as a standalone entity but Microware was bought out (just in time) by Radisys.
There is also the Kodak market failure. In the 1980’s Kodak invested billions of dollars into digital technology and introduced digital cameras in the U.S. but its market acceptance was low –except for a niche in the professional market.
Kodak launches in the beginning of the1990’s silver halides films (Advanced photo System, APS).
Digital Camera appeals however a wider audience –> market failure for Kodak even if APS system is still technically better than digital imagery!
Randy’s Response to the Anti-Dvorak Crusaders
One poorly written anti-Dvorak article has had more press in the last several years than the Dvorak keyboard itself. Written by Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis, it has been published in journals, magazines, and web sites again and again and again — even though The Dvorak Keyboard author Randy Cassingham debunked it years ago. Yet the authors still repeat the same tired old stuff again and again, as if they’ve never heard that many of the things they keep saying are plain wrong!
Here, for instance, is a letter from 1996. The authors did read it at that time and was published in Reason. Yet their meritless anti-Dvorak campaign continues.
Letters to the Editor
REASON Magazine
3415 S Sepulveda Blvd., Suite 400
Los Angeles CA 90034-6064
30 May 1996
Dear Editor:
The eight rambling pages by Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis (“L&M”) in your June issue devoted to slamming the Dvorak keyboard was not up to the standard I expect from REASON. While I agree that Dvorak’s slow acceptance may not be a good example of why markets can’t be “trusted,” L&M first slander “Typewriting Behavior”, the 1936 book by Dvorak, et al., presenting the keyboard’s design as “a late-night television infomercial rather than scientific work”. Rather, the 500+ page book stuffed with charts and design details is, in the preface, clearly noted as part of “a series of commercial education [books] to result from” their studies, which they gratefully acknowledge were funded by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (not the “Carnegie Commission”). L&M claim that they “discovered” this support, as if it were somehow hidden from public view. Hidden in the preface of the book?
They claim the 1944 Navy study was difficult to find, and the author’s names were hidden from public view. My publishing company has had copies of the report available for 15 years (and copies of “Typewriting Behavior”, for that matter). It clearly shows it was “Prepared by Training Section, Departmental Services Division of Shore Establishments and Civilian Personnel, Washington D.C.” — not an atypical attribution for a government study.
Their coup de grâce, though, is the GSA’s 1956 study by Earl Strong. L&M conclude that because there has been “no attempt to …discredit the GSA study”, academics and journalists are not living up to their high standards when writing about the Dvorak. L&M didn’t do their homework: Dvorak supporters would simply say “been there, done that.” Example: my 1986 book, which L&M could probably have found in their university libraries, spent several pages pointing out gross bias behind the GSA study. Harvard’s Richard Land was quoted as saying the GSA test was “poorly designed,” that “the conclusions are overstated,” and that the data actually showed “great promise” for further improvement by the Dvorak typists which Strong ignored. When other researchers wanted to see the raw data so they could draw their own conclusions, they found that Dr. Strong had destroyed it all! This is an example of the high standards L&M aspire to? Further, Strong was clearly biased: in 1949, he wrote “I am out to exploit [the ‘present keyboard’] to its very utmost in opposition to the change to new keyboards,” and there is evidence of a personal animosity between Drs. Strong and Dvorak.
I agree with L&M on another thing: there is a need for good-quality, unbiased studies on Dvorak. The best raw data I have access to at present is from KEYTIME, a Seattle-based company which uses keyboard instructional technologies they developed in house. In the past nine years, they have trained several hundred typists on Dvorak, and several thousand on Qwerty, using the exact same equipment and teaching methodologies. They have “repeatedly found” that after 15 hours of training and practice time, existing Qwerty hunt-and-peck typists can touch type at an average 20 WPM. After 15 hours of training and practice on Dvorak, similarly able (Qwerty) typists consistently average 25-30 WPM touch-typing on Dvorak. Further, KEYTIME reports that the Dvorak typists continue to improve at a higher rate. They have noticed a recent “a change in tide” of students wanting to learn Dvorak over Qwerty.
L&M say that “the advent of computer keyboards, which can easily be reprogrammed, …lowers the cost of converting to Dvorak to essentially zero” (true, yes), but “few computer users have adopted the Dvorak keyboard.” May I inquire as to the whereabouts of their “high standard”, statistically valid study to support this statement?
Your authors note that “there is further evidence of Qwerty’s viability in its survival throughout the world.” Indeed: since 1936, this has also been good proof of Dvorak’s viability.
L&M close with “the story of Dvorak’s superiority is a myth or, perhaps more properly, a hoax.” Concluding that there is some sort of conspiracy afoot among the obviously grass-roots 60-year support for the Dvorak is paranoia, not academic theory.
Sincerely,
[copy]
Randy Cassingham
Author, “The Dvorak Keyboard” (1986, Freelance Communications)