QWERTY

I read several news sites, one of them being slashdot.org. I will admit that on slashdot I almost always only read the headline because there are 100+ articles a day. But this one caught my eye and I read the whole article:

http://www.reason.com/news/show/29944.html

To sort of summarize the article and the context: Many of you have probably read or heard the stories about why we use the QWERTY keyboard - the standard keyboard we all use today. The story goes that the keyboard was designed way back in the beginnings of typewriters, and was designed to slow down the people typing so that the keys would not jam (the assumption being if you type too fast the typewriter hammers would hit each other and break or jam). Additionally, this guy named Dvorak who worked for the Navy was said to have designed a keyboard that was super efficient and ergonomically superior to the QWERTY keyboard, but because QWERTY was already out there, it won by default. I generally take everything I read on the internet with a grain of skepticism. But I have read that story so many times, on the internet, in magazines, newspapers, and even had professors in college tell it. So I tended to accept it as fact.

This article points out a lot of flaws with that logic, and our belief that "first-to-market" somehow always has such a huge advantage that it wins almost every time. First, they actually dug into all the studies and trials Dvorak did, and found that they were not really done in a way that did an accurate comparison. Second, another study was done in the 1950s (more accurately and unbiased) and kind of came to the conclusion that there was no major difference in performance or ergonomics.

The main argument though was that if there REALLY was some huge efficiency gain to switching to a different keyboard layout, business would have done it. If a company that did data entry, for example, could improve its entry efficiency by 20% (or more, according to Dvorak's study), they most certainly would have done it by now - given nearly 100 years to have made a transition. All computer operating systems have different keyboard layouts built into them, so there is no reason anymore that you wouldn't just be able to switch.

The article also goes on to debunk other examples of "first-to-market" - DOS vs. MacIntosh, Beta vs. VHS, etc. In fact, when you really look at most examples, first to market doesn't make much difference in the long run. DOS won at the time because hardware was cheaper than MacIntosh hardware. VHS ended up winning because it wasn't a proprietary format and it had more capacity. And if you look at the video game console market, first to market has rarely won - Nintendo always seems to come out behind the others each generation and yet has consistently one. The exception - they were first in the generation with GameCube, and the Sony PS2 won hands down even though it was really the last in that gen.

I have actually tried switching to the Dvorak keyboard. I type 100+ words a minute on a QWERTY, but I was interested in seeing if I could do better. Admittedly I didn't have enough patience to really give it a shot, but it was not nearly as easy to switch as you'd think by reading all the stories.