How confident would you be that a new company that produces a mouse-trap that’s 10% better at catching mice would be able to articulate the advantage in a way to get their new mouse-trap design to spread?
I’m very doubtful that’s the case. It’s very hard to know about that advantage for regular customers who stand in front of a shelf that provides different mouse-trap’s for sale.
It took the market a long time to adapt inventions as great as sliced bread. Donald Norman layed out in The Design of Everyday Things how it’s easy to build doors where it’s clear which side has to be pushed and which side has to be pulled. It still largely gets ignored and plenty of doors get build in ways where it’s not easy for the user to know whether they have to push or pull.
The market isn’t even strong enough to be able to clear other obviously bad door designs like door knobs to the extend that Australia went to forbid them in their new building codes.
I actually do expect the better mousetrap would spread, but it would be very slow. We’re talking metis timescales, not company-turns-a-profit timescales. A cheaper mousetrap would spread faster, although that wouldn’t hold for goods with a large price-signal-of-quality component.
Spelling it out a bit more, here’s two models of how a better mousetrap spreads:
Producer successfully communicates their advantage to consumers, so consumers switch to the new mousetrap immediately.
Whenever a consumer has a mouse, they buy a random mousetrap. If the mouse isn’t caught after some period of time, they switch to a different one. When a mousetrap works, they stick with it and maybe recommend it to their friends.
With only a 10% advantage, the second model likely won’t operate fast enough for the original inventor to benefit much from it, but it does drive adoption eventually.
People don’t buy random mousetraps. Incumbants in a market have various advantages over newcomers into a market. They have high volumn supply chains and an established brand for which they do marketing. Most purchasing decisions for mouse traps are not through recommendations from friends.
When it comes to many everyday things, the competition beween them is mostly a battle about marketing and as a result our everyday thing are a lot worse then they could be if innovations would effectively spread.
Random doesn’t mean uniformly random. As long as there’s some randomness, and people are more likely to stick with products which worked for them before, we expect drift toward the new design.
Marketing is important for any particular decision, but usually we wouldn’t expect one mousetrap design to have an inherent relative advantage in marketing over another; the marketing-relevant aspects are mostly orthogonal to the mouse-catching aspects. An incumbent company probably has a marketing advantage, but in the long run incumbent companies will adopt the new design, if they find that it sells slightly better.
With doors, the problem is quite different, because the person deciding what kind of door to install is often not the end consumer—especially for commercial properties—so the adopt-what-works force isn’t there.
How confident would you be that a new company that produces a mouse-trap that’s 10% better at catching mice would be able to articulate the advantage in a way to get their new mouse-trap design to spread?
I’m very doubtful that’s the case. It’s very hard to know about that advantage for regular customers who stand in front of a shelf that provides different mouse-trap’s for sale.
It took the market a long time to adapt inventions as great as sliced bread. Donald Norman layed out in The Design of Everyday Things how it’s easy to build doors where it’s clear which side has to be pushed and which side has to be pulled. It still largely gets ignored and plenty of doors get build in ways where it’s not easy for the user to know whether they have to push or pull.
The market isn’t even strong enough to be able to clear other obviously bad door designs like door knobs to the extend that Australia went to forbid them in their new building codes.
I actually do expect the better mousetrap would spread, but it would be very slow. We’re talking metis timescales, not company-turns-a-profit timescales. A cheaper mousetrap would spread faster, although that wouldn’t hold for goods with a large price-signal-of-quality component.
Spelling it out a bit more, here’s two models of how a better mousetrap spreads:
Producer successfully communicates their advantage to consumers, so consumers switch to the new mousetrap immediately.
Whenever a consumer has a mouse, they buy a random mousetrap. If the mouse isn’t caught after some period of time, they switch to a different one. When a mousetrap works, they stick with it and maybe recommend it to their friends.
With only a 10% advantage, the second model likely won’t operate fast enough for the original inventor to benefit much from it, but it does drive adoption eventually.
People don’t buy random mousetraps. Incumbants in a market have various advantages over newcomers into a market. They have high volumn supply chains and an established brand for which they do marketing. Most purchasing decisions for mouse traps are not through recommendations from friends.
When it comes to many everyday things, the competition beween them is mostly a battle about marketing and as a result our everyday thing are a lot worse then they could be if innovations would effectively spread.
Two things:
Random doesn’t mean uniformly random. As long as there’s some randomness, and people are more likely to stick with products which worked for them before, we expect drift toward the new design.
Marketing is important for any particular decision, but usually we wouldn’t expect one mousetrap design to have an inherent relative advantage in marketing over another; the marketing-relevant aspects are mostly orthogonal to the mouse-catching aspects. An incumbent company probably has a marketing advantage, but in the long run incumbent companies will adopt the new design, if they find that it sells slightly better.
With doors, the problem is quite different, because the person deciding what kind of door to install is often not the end consumer—especially for commercial properties—so the adopt-what-works force isn’t there.