On Wed, Mar 12, 2025 at 07:07:46PM -0400, Traveller Mailing List wrote:

> Sometimes, in tech, the "best" doesn't win; it may be the one that makes it
> to market first with enough of a lead time over everything else, or it
> ...

This is actually more the rule than the exception. Most of the time the market chooses an
inferior technology for a lot of reasons. The trick is that those technologies that win are
usually good enough.

> Or, the 'better' tech, however you choose to define it, might be enough
> better that it will win out even if it is at an initial disadvantage.
>
> Beta was technically better than VHS, but VHS won in the market because
> Sony held out on their refusal to license it for porn.
>

This is an example of good enough and I think that describing Beta as better than VHS loses
a lot of nuance. Not licensing to porn might have been a contributing factor but the big
thing was the length of the cassette. If [wikipedia:
wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHS#VHS_development) is correct then VHS was
defined with a 2 hour recording capacity. Beta didn't have that until Beta II and to get it
you had to sacrifice quality making the difference between Beta and VHS more of a wash.

> Token Ring started out as technically better than Ethernet, but Ethernet
> got nominally faster, sooner, and was "good enough" and cheaper to produce
> (Ethernet was able to run with RJ45 connectors before Token Ring, which
> used - and continued to support - the original clunky connectors long past
> the time it was really justifiable. That also made it cheaper to produce).

Token Ring toed the line IBM wanted to toe. They never licensed the technology to anyone
else and they were pretty obnoxious about giving out data about their chipsets so it was a
major expense to write a driver for it if you weren't Microsoft. As ethernet got better and
better, token ring turned into a really expensive IBM only option in a sea of cheap
PC clones running switched ethernet. There was no way to hold back the tide.

>
> [...snip...]
>

> Suppose that, for whatever reason, the Vilani didn't use fossil fuels. When
> they tried to "Vilanicise" everyone that they encountered, what would that
> have done to the tech base of what eventually accreted to the Ziru Sirka?
> Would this have changed after the Terran conquest, or after the Sylean
> conquest? Or, more accurately, _how much_ would they have changed? If the
> Vilani used steam-powered ground cars, would the Sylean Expansion have
> found everyone changed over to oil-fraction-powered internal-combustion
> engine ground cars, or would steam cars still have been at least a sizeable
> fraction of what was available?
>

I think that in a world lacking relatively high energy density battery tech, the outcome we
see is the outcome you get. Especially if the external costs of burning a fossil fuel to
power your conveyance isn't a factor. Cars might end up powered by oil burning steam engines
but ultimately that depends on the relative overall efficiency of steam cycle vs
otto cycle vs diesel cycle vs turbines. In twenty years we've watch the world of cars change from
relatively big otto cycle engines to smaller, far more efficient otto cycle + turbine
engines. Much of this happens because between 1976 and 1990 we decided that the big external
cost of cars, waste / pollution, had to be addressed. When I talk to car nuts today, I
carefully remind them that a car with electronic ignition, electronic fuel injection, and a
turbo charger, while common today, was a beast of a racing car as late as 1978. As far as
the Vilani go, I can't see competing with the economy in that way. The path might change but
the endpoints are the same.

Technology is frequently not about what's best, more often it's about what's got the correct
combination of good enough and cheap. Look for those two qualities in the endpoint of the
path. The electric car resurgance after nearly 100 years is driven by the fact that
producing any car is reasonably cheap today and today batteries are good enough that you can
build an all electric vehicle with a range greater than 200 miles. Factors adding drag are
the lack of charging infrastructure.

--
Chris

      __o          "All I was trying to do was get home from work."
    _`\<,_           -Rosa Parks
___(*)/_(*)____.___o____..___..o...________ooO..._____________________
Christopher Sean Hilton                    [chris/at/vindaloo/dot/com]