I have read the following some years ago, and recently I fell over it again in the book i have mentioned earlier, “information rules”. Here they write about collective switching costs, illustrated by an example of the QUERTY keyboard.
According to many reports, early promoters of the Type Writer brand of machine in the 1870’s intentionally picked this awkward configuration to slow down typists and thus reduce the incidence of jamming, to which their machines were prone….. Querty also allowed salesmen to impress customers by typing their brand name, Type Writer, rapidly, using keys only from the top row.
I don’t know whether this is true or not, but it is an interesting theory nonetheless. By the way, I remember some month ago I misspelled the word in an email to a coworker. Now how can anyone misspell qwerty?
February 20th, 2006 at 21:10
Interesting subject, wasnt there some guy who made an alternative keyboard? I think his name was dvorack, it was apperently a more effecient version, but it never succeded in pushing the qwerty type out of the market, do you know why??
February 20th, 2006 at 21:52
Most people, including the writers of the mentioned book, think it was because of network effects. In fact the quotation is taken from a chapter about network effects. The more common the QWERTY keyboard became, the more valuable did it get to learn how to use it. The switching costs (time) are relatively big in learning how to use a new keyboard layout.
But my theory is that this keyboard layout actually drove people mad. I am convinced that if you look at the keys for a long time, only the letters that spell the date of your death will appear to you. And this will eventually drive you mad. I am sure that such people as Charles Manson and several US postal workers used this type of keyboard. I think Da Vinci has laid out several clues about this in his paintings. And I am trying to fit Scientology to the theory somehow, but it still needs some works.