On May 9, 2:32 pm, Clever Monkey <spamt...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:
> Yes, and I may even agree. But this is not what I am taking umbrage
> with. The issue is that somehow overall market share should reflect
> this success. It does not, and likely never will.
I don't understand in what way that is a critique of the argument that
is sketched in that set of Power Point slides.
The slide that you are referring to argues that success does not
automatically follow from having technology that appears to be
superior, based on available information on technology introduction.
Even if *some* of the examples in the slide are tenuous ... how
tenuous they are would depend on what point is actually being made,
which is not something that can be easily seen in the visual appendage
to a talk without actually hearing the talk itself ... some of them
are quite clearly sound.
On introduction ... and if you skipped past the slide where the point
was made about the difference between analysis of business success
with retrospective and prospective units of analysis, go back and
unskip that slide ... Windows 3.1 *was* technically inferior to the
Macintosh operating system. It was a lot easier to crash, for one.
However, that technically inferior system *in conjunction with* its
other market advantages gave it a significant edge in the market-
place ... and as dominant as network economies are for operating
systems, an operating system with a substantial over-all edge is going
to dominate, and relegate other contenders to niche status.
And the point of the argument in that slide is that the *existing*
presumption in the literature that it is possible to translate
directly from the technical superiority or inferiority that can be
seen on introduction to market success does not hold up to scrutiny.
So it seems that you are not taking umbrage with the argument, but
with the presumption in the literature that the argument is
critiquing.
Now, whether Emacs is unambiguously technically superior to vi ...
that is, to say the least, debatable. I hope never to be condemned to
rely exclusively on either, but I can easily imagine alternative
scenarios where either one emerges as the lesser of two evils.
However, for the argument being made ... you only have to find two or
three of the examples to be actual examples of discernible technical
superiority that was not followed by market success to agree with the
position being argued that the one *does not automatically lead to the
other*.
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