The Persistence of the Inefficient: QWERTY's Survival

You use this every day. It wasn’t designed to be efficient. It was designed

to slow people down. The QWERTY keyboard was created to stop early typewriters

from jamming. That problem disappeared. But the layout stayed. Because by then,

everything depended on it. Machines. Training. Muscle memory.

Entire industries. A better layout existed. But switching meant breaking compatibility.

So improvement lost. The standard didn’t survive because it was optimal. It survived because

replacing it was too costly. Once systems align, change becomes harder than staying wrong.

What standards do you live with because replacing them would break everything?