It would be useful to know the extent to which the later periods are weighted by approving references to Liebowitz and Margolis.

Also, I notice that QWERTY mythology has yet to be addressed by Snopes, which is surprising since they routinely deflate popular economic fallacies. Perhaps it's a sore spot with the editors.

My browser can read your webpage again; thank you.

It's always a pleasure to see folklore corrected. One correction I saw recently was about "truck" stores as an evil exploitation of the labouring poor. Apparently the prime cause (in Britain, anyway) was a shortage of low-value coins - when employers issued their own substitutes they also had to set up a store that would accept them.

Do they ever use base ten vs. base twelve arithmetic as an exemplar for the inferior lock-in stuff? Seems like there isn't much economic who-whom to that.

Looking back, the Microsoft anti-trust case seems completely irrelevant now. When people actually came up with better browsers and search engines, they got adopted.

After watching how fast my daughter can text with one hand (actually just her thumb) and 12 buttons on her cell phone (using smart word identification software) I predict that will be the keyboard of the future.

The reason why the QWERTY myth is persistent is because the notion of increasing returns and technological lock-in is extremely plausible, to such an extent that to not believe that it sometimes occurs seems much more unreasonable than a Panglossian faith that all current technological standards represent the best standards ever devised. Note that critics of increasing returns don't actually dispute the underlying theory, just its particular applications - and I've always found it amusing how some critics seem to believe that attacking the iconic example of increasing returns is supposed to dismiss the entire enterprise. It's also been argued that the lemons problem isn't a huge issue in the market for used automobiles, yet I don't think there's been a post here adverse selection in with Marxist economics. What gives?

The research being done on lock-in is useful and illustrative. And plenty of reasonable doubt has been cast upon the QWERTY example in particular. I'm sure if you actually looked at the articles in the increasing returns literature, however, very few of them rely upon the QWERTY example directly but rather on its underlying logic. Anti-Microsoft techies aren't the only people with ideological interests in this argument - it's clear that there are plenty of libertarian techies who will cravenly attack network externalities in all of their manifestations.

Bryan Caplan & Ed Stringham argue here that network effects could make for workable anarcho-capitalism. I'm relatively open to anarchism, but it doesn't seem like a stable equilibrium. Plenty of states around, not much ungoverned & populated territory.

The reason why the QWERTY myth is persistent is because the notion of increasing returns and technological lock-in is extremely plausible

Is it? There is such high turnover in so many areas of technology that it is hard to take the idea of lock-in -- optimal or not -- very seriously.

a Panglossian faith that all current technological standards represent the best standards ever devised

Ah, but no one has made that claim -- only that the purported superior alternatives are not in fact superior. Could mean that what we have is superior -- like Microsoft Excel rather than Lotus 1-2-3 -- or it could mean that what we have is no better or worse (like what sounds we pair with the meaning "dog").

Note that critics of increasing returns don't actually dispute the underlying theory, just its particular applications

But who cares if the theory is logically sound if it describes the opposite of the real world? Toying around with models is easy enough -- getting insight into how the world works is the hard part.

I've always found it amusing how some critics seem to believe that attacking the iconic example of increasing returns is supposed to dismiss the entire enterprise.

It's not the iconic example -- it's one of only two or three that have ever been offered, and the one that everyone on the pro side always seizes hold of.

The basic idea that some types of social relations can be called a network or web or whatever, and that each individual benefits the more people there are, is not new at all. Adam Smith said basically that when he talks about the increasing gains that can be made from free trade among people in a trading network -- minus the modern jargon.

The brand new, potentially upsetting idea was that this could lead to lock-in of inferior alternatives when there were better ones available and do-able at the time, like the QWERTY triumphing over the Dvorak keyboard. So, other than restating that humans are social, and that some of their interactions reward people the more there are, this trend doesn't seem to have contributed the revolutionary ideas that the players claim.

It does seem odd that the "world's fastest typist" used Dvorak when hardly anyone else does:

http://thebrainiac.wordpress.com...fastest-typist/

That is just anecdotal, but there could be advantages at high typing speeds or something.