The QWERTY keyboard was designed in 1874 to prevent mechanical typewriter arms from jamming. It's one of the least efficient keyboard layouts possible — and it's on virtually every keyboard in the world, 150 years after the jamming problem disappeared.

In 1932, August Dvorak developed an alternative layout that puts the most common letters on the home row. Studies suggested typing speeds could increase 20-40%. It's been available for almost a century. Almost no one uses it.

This is a network effect in action. The value of certain technologies depends not on their quality, but on how many other people use them. A phone is useful only if other people have phones. A social network is useful only if your friends are on it. A keyboard layout is useful only if every computer and every typist has agreed on the same one.

Once a technology hits critical mass in a networked market, switching becomes nearly impossible — even to a clearly superior alternative. The cost isn't just the switch itself; it's the cost of leaving everyone else behind, or forcing everyone to switch simultaneously. Coordination problems at that scale almost never solve themselves.

This is why Silicon Valley investors obsess over network effects. A product with strong network effects becomes exponentially more valuable as it grows, and once it reaches dominance, it becomes almost unassailable. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, and Twitter all became entrenched through network effects rather than superior product design. Competitors have launched better-designed alternatives for over a decade; users rarely leave.

Network effects also explain technology monopolies that would otherwise be impossible to justify. Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, Excel — all face frequent competition from technically superior or cheaper alternatives. They win because everyone else uses them, and the cost of switching workflows, training, and compatibility is prohibitive.

The economic implications are strange. Traditional markets self-correct: a better product displaces a worse one. Networked markets don't. They can get stuck on outcomes that everyone agrees are suboptimal. Economists call this a 'lock-in.'

Breaking a lock-in usually requires a paradigm shift — a change so large it resets the entire network. Smartphones broke the lock-in of traditional cellphones because the whole device category changed. Email mostly replaced fax because fax simply stopped being worth maintaining.

Until that kind of disruption arrives, the world keeps typing on QWERTY.