How often do superior alternatives fail to catch on?
Multiple dimensions.<p>The common theme why people get confused about &quot;superior&quot; products not winning boils down to ignoring the <i>multiple dimensions</i> of quality.  A product&#x27;s <i>overall</i> &quot;superiority&quot; is a single score that compresses multiple scores of the various attributes of the product.  If one is ignorant (or discounts the value) of the other dimensions, he will be perplexed why the supposedly &quot;inferior&quot; solution won.<p>E.g. I never understood why bicycles didn&#x27;t beat out cars.  Bicycles are obviously superior because:<p>+ narrow profile can squeeze through tight alleys or even heavily treed forests that cars can reach<p>+ requires no fossil fuel that emits pollution<p>+ costs less than 1&#x2F;100th the price of a car<p>+ easily repaired by homeowners in the garage because no computers<p>+ etc, etc<p>That fixation on those attributes causes the confused person to totally miss the <i>other positive attributes</i> of the car:<p>+ travel faster than 25 mph with minimum physical exertion<p>+ typical size car can carry 5 adults which is ~1000 pounds of weight<p>+ carry entire week&#x27;s worth of groceries (~10 bags)<p>+ occupants don&#x27;t get wet when when it rains<p>If one doesn&#x27;t understand the <i>all the multidimensions</i> of qualities and weigh them in an objective manner that&#x27;s detached from personal preferences, he&#x27;ll always be confused why &quot;superior&quot; USENET lost to &quot;inferior&quot; Reddit, or why &quot;superior&quot; Lisp lost the popularity contest to &quot;inferior&quot; C++&#x2F;Java&#x2F;Python&#x2F;Go&#x2F;etc, or why Mac OS 9 lost to Windows NT.<p>Likewise, there were multidimensional factors to Betamax vs VHS and &quot;picture quality&quot; was only one of them.