Inferior technologies can dominate for a century through network externalities and lock-in.

Evidence

Paul David (1985, 1986) provides the most prominent example of technological path dependence—the well-known standard of the QWERTY keyboard and its amazing predominance for more than 100 years. This standard has spread around the world and, puzzlingly enough, has never been seriously challenged by all the newly developed, technically more efficient alternatives. David explains this inefficient long-term predominance as being the result of a path-dependent process, which was set up owing to some initial events and advanced mainly through network externalities leading into a technological lock-in early on. — Jörg Sydow, Georg Schreyögg, and Jochen Koch, Organizational Path Dependence, 13

Categorization

• DEFINE: Canonical illustration of lock-in: early events plus network externalities freeze an inefficient standard in place.
• CANDY: The fact that a keyboard layout beaten on efficiency still rules the world a century on is easily retold.
• XREF: Connects to Arthur (1989) increasing returns and to North’s institutional path dependence.