Past decisions constrain future options, even when better alternatives exist.
David's and Arthur's work. The QWERTY keyboard, the 4-foot-8.5-inch rail gauge and the QWERTY-derived phone keypad all persist because coordination benefits exceed any improvement from switching.
In practice
- A city whose tram gauge was fixed by one nineteenth-century contractor is buying rolling stock to that gauge in 2024.
- A company that chose a database in year one has an architecture organised around it by year six, and the choice is no longer reversible on the merits.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Design & Systems
- Essay
- Why systems behave against intuition