I honestly don’t get why the heck we use this stupid layout… please somebody help me understand.
In: 131
You’ve just stumbled upon an example of path dependence. Basically, it’s the thing everyone uses because it’s the thing everyone uses.
The QWERTY keyboard came about because it kept typewriter arms from jamming. So QWERTY became the standard. Everyone who learned to type learned QWERTY, because that’s what was available.
Now you develop a new electric typewriter where the arms don’t jam. So you could put a Dvorak keyboard on it.
You’re the procurement manager for a large office building. You are going to place an order for 200 electric typewriters for your secretary pool. What are you going to buy: the Dvorak, which is more efficient, or the QWERTY, which everyone knows how to use?
If you know how to type, you will type much faster on a keyboard layout that you know than a layout that you don’t know, regardless of what it is. So you, Mr. Procurement Manager, are going to buy the QWERTY, because even if the Dvorak is more efficient in the long run, it will result in a *massive* drop in productivity *right now*, and you really want to keep your job.
All the other procurement managers make the same choice, so much so that only QWERTY keyboards get made. And because that’s all that’s available, that’s what the upcoming generation learns to type on.
Slap on your aviators, because now it’s the 80’s and you need to procure keyboards for your brand-new desktop computers. Everyone in your office moving over from typewriters knows QWERTY, and so that’s what you buy keyboards in, and so that ends up being the only way keyboards are sold (excepting specialty orders.)
So now everyone who uses a computer – which by the 90s grows to include everyone – learns to type one QWERTY.
Flash forward. Now a bunch of your workers are using mobile phones with text capability. But what sucks is the phones use the letter scheme the way it’s laid out on touch tone phones, which is hard to figure out unless you dialed a LOT of 900 numbers when you were a kid. You know what would work out better instead? A bunch of those new BlackBerry phones with the familiar QWERTY keyboard.
Ok, congratulations on your promotion to Apple Product Development. You’re working on this new device, the iPhone. It’s going to have a *virtual* keyboard, one that doesn’t even have real keys. You could set up any keyboard layout you want, change it every day if you like. What are you going to set as the default layout?
Probably the same thing that anyone who has ever typed on any device — typewriter, computer, phone — has used: QWERTY. Because it’s *still* faster to type on a keyboard you know than a keyboard you don’t.
And now kids are learning to type on a QWERTY keyboard without ever touching a physical key. And that’s how it’s going to be for probably generations because no new keyboard layout will ever save enough effort to compensate for the effort of unlearning QWERTY and relearning a new system.
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