I was reminded of the “Chopsticks Phenomenon” at a Chinese restaurant yesterday, when a morsel of food dropped from the chopsticks I was holding onto my T-shirt. I’m not unskilled with chopsticks and, to be honest, I choose to use them over knife-and-fork, when given a choice at a Chinese restaurant. But this doesn’t alter the simple fact that chopsticks are a truly awful technology for transferring food to your mouth.
And that, in a nutshell, is the Chopsticks Phenomenon. Here’s a more precise statement of it:
Under the right circumstances, usually involving very effective marketing, a genuinely poor technology can reign supreme, vanquishing superior technologies or preventing them from developing.
The fact that over a billion people eat their food with chopsticks proves this principle beyond any argument. In China the Johnny-come-lately technology of knife and fork just never stood a chance. And once a technology gets as dominant as chopsticks, nobody even questions whether it’s a good idea.
Chinese cuisine is what it is, because of those goofy chopsticks. It offers a wide variety of dishes, usually eaten with rice or noodles, with the meat or vegetables in every dish cut up into small chopstick-manageable pieces. Each dish will likely have a sauce which handily sticks grains of rice together, so that they too are chopstick-manageable. And, imho, Chinese cuisine is amongst the tastiest cuisines in the world.
You see, the dominance of a lousy technology may appear to have positive consequences. Chinese cuisine would not be what it is, were it not for chopsticks. It would be something else.
Despite this positive outcome, we cannot logically conclude: “therefore chopsticks are a good thing”. They are not, they’re ridiculous.
You might think that this is the same as the “VHS v Betamax” story. But it is not making the same point. True, VHS triumphed over Betamax despite the generally acknowledged fact that Betamax was technically superior. But in terms of usability, actually there was no difference – given that you had the appropriate player. With chopsticks, it is different. There is a usability problem.
What has this got to do with IT?
The chopsticks phenomenon is one of the ideas I use to try to comprehend IT. There are quite a few examples of IT “chopsticks”. Relational database is one of these. It triumphed in the marketplace because it marketed itself as being “mathematically correct” when in fact it was based on a data model that was incomplete and unusable for some kinds of data structures. “Mathematically correct” was a lie. The truth was it was based on an inappropriate mathematical model.
Because of their poor physical implementations, initially relational databases were, inherently unsuitable for transaction processing and only became suitable when Moore’s Law eventually compensated for their inefficient retrieval of data. I will write another posting on this topic in a few days to provide a detailed technical justification, but the point is this:
Dominant technology can be truly awful, but people get used to it. And, if you turn the marketing noise up loud enough, people eventually come to believe that the technology is good.
Note: This is a key IT Trends posting that I will probably refer back to, to discuss various business events as they occur in the IT market. A list of such postings can be found here:
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