Does our Economic System
Ensure that the Better Product
Always Wins the Market?

The blessing that is corporate diversity will invariably result in a number of systems competing with each other.
As each company strives to make its own system globally accepted, the first phase is often the coexistence of several standards.
Dictated by the law of averages, there will be better and less useful standards. In absence of an agreement, however, the one that finally dominates the global market is not necessarily the best one!
One example springs to mind: Home video recorders.

When magnetic film recording became possible, there were three systems in fierce competition:

Twenty years later, the clearly superior Beta system had been pushed out of the home market into the studio niche and VHS had become the global standard.
By what mechanism did we all come to accept an inferior standard? Is it due to the powerful muscle of one group of companies or simply an historical coincidence? You tell me.

Does it mean a computer operating system is better because it is the choice of 90% of the users? Why can an alternative which, years before offered the convenience of the mouse, the trash can, voice recognition, plug-and-play and global networking make up only 9% of the market?

Wall Street is convinced that millions of flies can't be wrong!

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