10x Better
Humans are remarkable creatures of habit that are resistant to change. There are many examples of things that could be improved, but because an existing system is already in place that is good enough, nothing much happens. That is, mass adoption of the new and better thing™ does not happen.
Really, that's not even a bad thing. If it ain't broke don't fix it, because there are always switching costs.
Some examples:
- Instead of using IPv6 (the proper solution), the vast majority of the internet still uses IPv4, with workarounds like NATs to get around IPv4 address exhaustion
- The Dvorak Keyboard layout is probably strictly better in objective terms than QWERTY, but because most of the world already learned and is used to QWERTY, it is what stayed
I think the way to get mass adoption of a new thing™ is simple, it's just hard. It's to make the new thing 10x better than the old thing.
The order of magnitude shift is very important here. 50% better, 2x, even 3x better—this is not enough to get people to change. But if you are 10x better, then the tailwinds come like a hurricane. People will tell everyone they know about this new thing because it's just so much better.
This might seem like an obvious and banal observation, but it is relevant when you are deciding what you might build and what you might work on. If what you're building doesn't even have a shot at being 10x better than the current thing, if the value add has a ceiling lower than that, it's not worth working on if you're gunning for the gold medal.
In a space where 10x improvement isn't possible, you can still do well here, but you'll be competing primarily on distribution rather than product.