Tech visionaries aim for elegant ideals but 80/20 "worse is better" compromises usually takeover: • UNIX, not Symbolics Genera • Linux, not Plan 9 • JS-heavy Web 2.0, not the Semantic Web When forecasting the future, consider where adopter laziness can erode elegance.
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"Worse is better" only happens when competing products are both 10x better than the existing alternative. Name a single 10x product that failed to take over the world (but which didn't merely get out competed by another 10x, but incrementally worse product).
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Examples: Beta vs. VHS, Lisp vs. C, Windows vs. Unix, and so forth. The winning product is often incrementally worse than the losing product ("worse is better"), but both the winner and the loser were breakthrough products in comparison to what they were replacing.
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The delusion of "worse is better" is falsely believing your losing product is 10x better than the winning product. Example: While both C and LISP were 10x better than assembly, LISP was/is only incrementally better than C (and therefore was not enough to overpower it).
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When you are competing with incremental technology, whether or not you win is determined more by the happenstance of market forces/circumstance than by merit.
End of conversation
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