The QWERTY Myth

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Cameron Marlow writes about how many taps it takes to enter a URL into a phone, and he's written a tool to tell us. (Predictive text systems like T9 don't help for URLs.)

Meanwhile, depending on whether you believe Gartner or the GSM Association, either 2005 or 2006 was the first year in which the number of SMS or text messages sent worldwide passed one trillion. Since fewer than 1% of the phones in the world have a Qwerty keyboard and spam is not yet a major problem (because of the economics), almost all of those one trillion messages were tapped out on a 10-digit keypad.

Back in the days of the (first?) bubble, people used to talk a lot about network effects and the overwhelming competitive advantages that they created. The more buyers visit eBay, the more sellers show up; the more goods there are for sale, the more buyers visit and so on until it becomes almost impossible for a new entrant to displace eBay. This was one argument used to support claims of "first-mover advantage" and strategies like "grow big, grow fast, or go home."

Network effects are real and powerful - eBay itself was defeated in the Japanese market because it was too late to enter, and more recently MySpace and Skype and Google's AdSense (although not Google search itself) have demonstrated the power of networks.

However, during the bubble people made a much stronger claim for network effects: that a product or service could get 'locked in,' such that customers would still choose it over a new product that was clearly superior. Their favorite example was the Qwerty keyboard layout, which was supposed to be unassailable despite 'better' alternatives like the Dvorak layout.

Cute story, but it just wasn't true. No one has ever demonstrated that the Dvorak or any other layout offers a meaningful advantage over Qwerty.

The rise of SMS should kill this myth. One trillion messages were composed last year using a keyboard that is clearly worse than Qwerty by any standard measure - speed, ergonomics, error rate - because a regular phone is smaller and cheaper than a Qwerty phone.

'Smaller and cheaper' are so important for phones that even RIM has had to degrade the keyboard on Blackberry phones in order to broaden their appeal.

Network effects are real, and confer real competitive advantages, but there is no such thing as lock-in. There is no product or service that a customer won't drop if something better comes along. It's just not always obvious what 'better' means. That's part of the Innovator's Dilemma.

Thanks to Jake for sending me Cameron's post.

Update: A Citigroup analyst believes that 60%-70% of RIM's Pearl phones are being bought by current Blackberry subscribers. Not only does this mean that RIM is having trouble breaking out of its niche, it also means that existing Blackberry owners are willing to give up a full Qwerty keyboard.