On Complexity Economics

We all know what keyboard(s) are. Surprisingly, they all look the same; they have the same layout. Weirdly, all alphabets are placed here and there. Who even came up with the idea that it should start with Q and not A. Growing up it bothered me a lot. The QWERTY keyboard(s), as it is called is a counterintuitive thing.

Historically, QWERTY was not the only type of keyboard available. DVORAK was once one of the fierce competitors. This is an interesting fact from the economic point of view. Now, one could reason that DVORAK was driven out of the market due to fierce competition from the superior QWERTY type. But that also sounds like Winner takes it all. It is just that this reasoning might not be okay for technological advancements. For regular commodities, it just makes sense to switch to superior ones if and when they are available but that might not be the case with other types of commodities or in general technology. A few years ago I switched to Linux after ditching Windows. That required some learning and unlearning. Similarly, due to the differences in the layout, it requires a certain training to switch from QWERTY to DVORAK. Say, initially 80% of all the keyboards were of QWERTY type and rest were of the type DVORAK. I reckon it presents a challening situation for the CEO of DVORAK Inc. One could say that DVORAK has to be no just superior in other sense but it also has to convince alot of people to go through retraining. Unless it happens, we can expect the market share of DVORAK to remain the same or maybe go down. But this whole calculation changes when both QWERTY and DVORAK are equally popular. They are equal contender of being the default keyboard.

Lets say an individual of type D has a natural inclination for the DVORAK keyboard.