The factors that spread innovations, from the personal ones listed in Chapter 4 to the broader ones listed above, are largely about ease of adoption. The reason why Internet and cell phone usage climbed faster than previous technologies isn’t because things happen faster today. (Nor is it because these technologies are bigger leaps forward than previous ones.) It’s simply because the barriers of entry were low. People already had PCs and phone lines, making Internet use cheap and easy (economics). For cellular phones, the population already had daily experience with personal telephone usage and cordless phones, and their frequent use was accepted social behavior (culture). If you think about it, the cell phone isn’t more than a cordless phone with unlimited (well, sometimes) range. The Internet and World Wide Web, for all their wonders, were an extension of the PCs and modems already in use — AOL had trained millions to use email, and word processors were popular applications on those computers. The goodness/adoption paradox surfaces if, for fun, we separate goodness (from the expert’s point of view) from the factors that drive adoption. From the expert view of goodness, better technologies existed for publishing and networking than Berners-Lee’s Web. Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart had talked about and demoed them for decades. But those “better” ideas were demanding in ways that would have raised barriers to adoption in 1991. At best, they would have cost more to build and taken more time to engineer. We can’t know whether those additional barriers would have prevented the Web from succeeding or merely have changed its ascension. It’s also possible these alterative web designs might have had advantages that Berners-Lee’s Web didn’t have, that would have positively impacted ease of adoption.
When we view things that we have adopted, it is not always the case that the best ideas win out. Usually, it is the case where the ideas with the best ease of adoption (i.e lowest barriers to entry) win out. Low barriers also enable fast adoption, hence speeding up innovation and new technologies.
