Extreme lock-in makes alternative action infeasible and forces newcomers to conform

Evidence

In its extreme form, the dominant pattern gains a deterministic character, and alternative courses of action are no longer feasible for various reasons: high switching costs, sunk costs, monopoly, and so forth. By implication, further decisions (owing to lack of alternatives, they are actually no longer decisions) are bound to replicate the path. Even newcomers are forced to adopt it. Agents continue to reproduce this and only this particular outcome. This extreme form of lock-in has been found with technological solutions (e.g., the QWERTY keyboard). — Jörg Sydow, Georg Schreyögg, and Jochen Koch, Organizational Path Dependence, 47

Categorization

• CANDY: The QWERTY keyboard as the canonical example of a locked-in path is an easy, portable tidbit for any conversation about why bad standards persist.
• SEED: An essay angle on why we keep the descendants of arbitrary choices — keyboards, clothing sizes, software APIs — long after their founding reasons vanish.