What if someone invented a better mousetrap and the world yawned? | Hacker News Reader

What if someone invented a better mousetrap and the world yawned?

nytimes.com

11 pointsedw51919 comments

"Consider that Douglas Engelbart invented the mouse in 1964. It was obvious to many people that it was a better way to control a computer, yet it took two decades even to begin reaching a mass audience. Or consider the hyperlink, invented independently by Mr. Engelbart and the computing evangelist Ted Nelson in the mid-1960s. It took roughly three decades to reach the public in the form of the World Wide Web."

These examples are starting to wear thin. It took three decades for computers to become accessible enough, financially, for these things to even make sense to offer to the masses, and it required a critical mass of users to make sense to start doing business over the Internet. A wikipedia that no one could edit or an Amazon that no one bought anything on because they didn't have a computer in their home would be quite lame indeed.

The invention of the printing press didn't make everyone literate overnight; the 30 years it took for the mouse to enter widespread adoption is nothing.

That's not to mention that it's not "obvious" to me that a mouse is a better way to control a computer. If I had to construct a "find" query using a point-and-click interface, I would be highly annoyed. I use keyboard macros on GMail so that I can do everything without touching the mouse, and I get really annoyed when the page loses focus and I have to click inside it to restore it.

So not only does acceptance take time and require good timing, but it may also be that something that is "obviously" better may just seem obviously better to you.

Or obviously better in retrospect.

I'm with you on the keyboard. It's substantially easier to process large amounts of data with a UNIX pipeline or an SQL query than it is with many GUI tools. Many people don't realize that.

A good (standardised, consistent) mouse-driven interface means one can use an unfamiliar program without reading any documentation first. This, I think, explains the popularity of the mouse (along with its low cost relative to touch-screens and other similar input devices). But giving a program input in this way can be very slow. The experienced user can't get much faster than the novice.

A mouse, of course, is a good input method when it makes sense for gestures in 2 dimensions to control something. (Hmm, that is rather tautologous.) E.g. drawing (but then a graphics tablet is probably better for this, but more expensive).

With a text-based interface, one must read and learn before one can use an unfamiliar program. But giving the program input can then typically be much faster, and the program can be easily scriptable.

FTA:

“When I started I thought that this would take 6 to 12 months,” Mr. Harman said. What he found instead were companies that had little interest in redesigning their products, even in the face of the promise of double-digit increases in efficiency.

I've found that you need for something to be at least 10 times better before people will consider making the effort to think about using it.

A factor of nine improvement has been noted elsewhere on this forum: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=196994

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=211712

It's all about timing. Imagine if the first hybrid car came out when gas cost $10 a gallon.

Gas does cost $10 a gallon (in Europe).

As far as the power supply fan is concerned, their manufacturers don't care about improving its efficiency. This is because you are not the real customer. Dell, HP, et al are. When they place an order with the metal-bending shop in China, all they care about is price. If putting a more efficient fan in the power supply is going to raise the price by a few pennies, they won't be interested.

The only way anything that the high-efficiency power supply is going to fly is if it is going into a high-end product.

Or if it's going to a customer who is using a large enough quantity that efficency gains of a few percentage points are big savings.

If Google can shave .5 percent off their electric bill by using a more efficient cooling fan on PSU's going in to their server farms, it's worth it to spend a fair amount to realize that savings, especially since they know their usage is going to grow.

Of course no one would care. New ideas are always repelled by inertia. Why do you think we still use the terribly inefficient QWERTY keyboard?

Does anyone have an idea how he could have managed to cast the vortex in his bathtube?

Dvorak felt like that trying to topple qwerty.

yeah...

Dvorak came first.

No, Dvorak came up with the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard after studying the behavior of typists using previously available typewriters and presented it as an alternative to Qwerty...

Just double-checked. Yup, looks like I have it wrong. For some reason I had it in my mind that alphabetical keyboards came first, then Dvorak and Sholes were introduced within a year or so of each other and Sholes won out.

The reason the QWERTY layout was created was due to typewriters. They tried to move the most commonly used letters away from each other to avoid the "typewriter levers/hands" from locking up against each other when someone was quick typing. Thus, QWERTY is quite inefficient since it's trying to make commonly used letters as far away as possible.

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