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.

What has this got to do with Productivity?

Just one point, things are not what they seem. What looks like a clever idea can have many drawbacks.  I’m not about to have a long rant against the mouse, but it is worth noting that nobody ever gets taught to use a mouse. Let me explain:

There are three modes of working with a desktop computer:

1. Two hands at the keyboard – highly productive for most applications.
2. One hand on the keyboard and one on the mouse – less productive for most applications but most productive for graphical applications. (Note that if you’re left handed this is a different and probably more inconvenient experience – keyboards are build for the right-handed.)
3. One hand on the mouse – usually least productive.

When should you be using which approach? The answer to this depends on the context, but to some extent also on the mouse you have.

The original Apple mouse hand but one button. Steve Jobs kept to this for years and it was, no doubt about it, dumb. Steve Jobs is a genius in many ways, but he got snakes in his head when it came to the mouse.

Here’s one of the main things that is wrong with the mouse:

It’s easier to explore a new piece of software using the mouse than it is using the keyboard.

We actually tend to do that in mode 3 (as described above.) We lean back and mouse around. The consequence is that the first way we learn to do most things in a new application is via the least productive mode of using the computer.

That wouldn’t be so bad if we got into the habit of learning the mode 1 way of using the application later on, but most of us don’t.