Covid and keyboards – How the pandemic accelerated the digital shift By Laurin Zils COVID-19 has shaken up companies around the world and turned them upside down. Revenues and stock prices plummeted. However, the pandemic has also created an environment of digital transformation. Deeply embedded structural processes that felt frozen all of a sudden were put to the test and adapted. Why did it require a pandemic to realize these slumbering optimization potentials? The example of the (non-)evolution of the keyboard suggests that crises are sometimes necessary for disruptive innovation.
Paul A. David wrote a vastly cited article about QWERTY in the renowned journal The American Economic Review. He laid the foundation for today’s broadly recognized concept of path dependence. David used the ever-persisting QWERTY keyboard phenomenon to conclude an effect he called “technological lock-in.” Indeed, technology has “locked in” in the case of the QWERTY keyboard. All of this would not have been worth noting had not more efficient keyboard arrangement forms emerged in the meantime. David presented studies that suggested keyboard systems with which users could type significantly faster. However, the QWERTY system was already widespread and had established itself. Users have become accustomed to it and are not willing to change. That is regarded as a technological path, that in that sense, appears irreversible. Over 35 years after publishing David’s essay, QWERTY is still the dominant form of key arrangement, whether on a touchscreen or a physical keyboard.
Life today, for most, appears hardly imaginable without keyboards, whether they enable sending a text message as a digital onscreen-variant or even the writing of this text on a computer. Historically, keyboards evolved from typewriters, which were invented over 150 years ago. Typewriters revolutionized the way society communicated and wrote text. The influence of the typewriter is crucial to ”In essence, the existence of an understanding the already established way of doing modern implications of technologthings, no matter how flawed, ical change. lessens the likelihood of change” Nearly all keyboards used today with Latin alphabet letters printed on them start on the top left with the keys QWERTY (or QWERTZ in some countries). For technical reasons, the QWERTY arrangement was necessary to build typewriters. In 1985, when the modern keyboard was already around, 14
Path dependence is a concept that a variety of scientific disciplines use. It is embedded in economics and social sciences. As the economist Douglass North put it, path dependence describes the “powerful influence of the past on the present and future.” North and other scholars use the concept in the discipline of the New Institutional Economics to describe the degree of (in-)efficiency of
