"Now, having people adopt better-than-C++ and better-than-CSS might take a little bit of the psychoanalysis (marketing?) you propose."
I don't mean marketing, I mean actually designing something better. A lot of people don't actually know what better means. It's like the Betamax myth. A lot of people believe that Betamax was the technologically superior version, and it lost because of other reasons. This is bunk. Betamax's edge in picture quality over VHS, all else being equal, was slim to nonexistant. But Betamax was locked to a relatively fast tape speed to keep quality from degrading. VHS let people run at much slower tape speeds in order to fit more video on the same tape. Betamax allowed you record about an hour worth of video programming on a standard tape. VHS originally allowed two, and then they just said the heck with it and let you record four hours of bad-looking video. It turns out, though, that it's far more important to most people to have the ENTIRETY of a movie or (in the case of a four-hour tape, an NFL game) than it was to have the part of it you recorded look pristine.
The lesson everyone draws from Betamax is that we can't have nice things and technological superiority is trumped by other considerations. The lesson everyone SHOULD draw from Betamax is that to win, you have to be better at the right things to actually be better.
Betamax and VHS are incrementally different, not radically different as the blog post discussed. Radically different would be VHS vs. streaming video, and I suspect there is no technological overlap between the two. Incrementalists would have us stream video to tape decks, or something.
I don't mean marketing, I mean actually designing something better. A lot of people don't actually know what better means. It's like the Betamax myth. A lot of people believe that Betamax was the technologically superior version, and it lost because of other reasons. This is bunk. Betamax's edge in picture quality over VHS, all else being equal, was slim to nonexistant. But Betamax was locked to a relatively fast tape speed to keep quality from degrading. VHS let people run at much slower tape speeds in order to fit more video on the same tape. Betamax allowed you record about an hour worth of video programming on a standard tape. VHS originally allowed two, and then they just said the heck with it and let you record four hours of bad-looking video. It turns out, though, that it's far more important to most people to have the ENTIRETY of a movie or (in the case of a four-hour tape, an NFL game) than it was to have the part of it you recorded look pristine.
The lesson everyone draws from Betamax is that we can't have nice things and technological superiority is trumped by other considerations. The lesson everyone SHOULD draw from Betamax is that to win, you have to be better at the right things to actually be better.