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Microsoft Word became the default word processor for many people around the world beginning in the 1980s—a period during which What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) text editors were few and far between, and the computer mouse was a new, hot thing that people couldn’t decide if they liked or not.
Those were very early days for the personal computer overall, but they also arguably influenced the shape of most word processing software that we use, today.
This maybe isn’t surprising to hear: we perhaps take for granted that certain types of tools are a certain shape, because they’ve always been that way, and thus, all future versions maintain that shape until a radical disruption—some new, obviously better shape—emerges and flourishes.
In this case, we have a portion of the screen in which we can type, we have buttons that allow us to turn highlighted text bold or italic, or which allow us to turn that text into a clickable hyperlink, we have formatting options for setting up our paragraphs and line spacing and fonts and so on.
Microsoft Word innovated within this space, introducing many of these user interface concepts for the first time, and because of their dominance within the corporate world, and their omnipresence in the personal computer space for much of the last four decades, users became accustomed to this setup, familiar with how it works, and thus, continued to buy software that utilizes the same overall scheme.
Alternative options that take a radically different approach might attract a small number of adopters, but in general, people are comfortable with WYSIWYG frameworks, and thus, even very distinct, non-Word software tends to use a version of these same design principles.
There are a few concepts at work here, that often connect to and amplify each other in interesting ways.
Path dependence is an economics term that refers to how the choices we make are shaped by previous decisions we’ve made, or by the circumstances of our lives.
Said another way: if we’ve grown up with WYSIWYG word processors, that influences our future decisions.
We recognize this model of software layout as being the proper one for writing, our writing habits come to revolve around this type of design sensibility, and using other options would require we break through behavioral lock-in effects—meaning, we’d have to change everything about how we work to adopt an entirely new kind of word processing software setup. We’d also have to struggle against the frictions that arise any time we attempt to defy existing conventions.
In the world of science—physics, chemistry, and biology in particular—but also engineering and to a smaller degree, economics, the term hysteresis refers to how dependent a system’s current state is on its history and the forces that shaped its history.
The specific meaning of this varies by field of inquiry, but in general, it’s important because it allows us to measure the influence of older or original factors on an eventual output: to see past influences rippling forward to impact the current state of things.
There’s an element of determinism in this conversation—which refers to the philosophical concept that all events are predetermined, based on previous events—which can be disconcerting. It’s uncomfortable, thinking that we might not have free will, and thus, the decisions we make which we perceive to be our own are actually determined by all the factors that shaped us throughout our lives, including random background influences like environmental pollution, the medication we took as children, and what we happen to know about a particular subject when we made a specific decision on a day we can’t remember over a decade ago.
This is uncomfortable, and very much up for debate both on the neurological level—wondering if our brains are actually just complex algorithms making choices based on existing influences, and post hoc justifying them to us, to make us feel like we’re in control—and on the broader, sociological level: asking whether our societies and the way we engage with each other is deterministic, or if it’s partially deterministic, our actions somewhat predictable if we ever developed a model of a sufficiently grand scale, but still adjustable by randomness; including human-instigated randomness, potentially.
It’s perhaps more comfortable to discuss deterministic factors as they apply to less personal-seeming things, like the economy.
Sometimes called the “innovation butterfly,” referencing the butterfly effect metaphor that is meant to help explain chaos theory—a butterfly flaps its wings on one side of the planet, causing massive change on the other side of the planet, due to a chain of interconnected and compounding effects—path dependence within the economic world is generally utilized to help explain how new technologies are adopted by the public, and how entire industries emerge, evolve, and disappear over time.
Consider the Standard Railroad Gauge: a measurement for railroad tracks, designating how far apart the rails on the tracks should be (4’ 8.5”, or 1.435 meters), and the most widely adopted standard for railroad tracks worldwide (about 55% of all tracks around the world are build using this standard, including most high-speed railroads).
Because the UK was early to the development of locomotive technology, they sold the US a lot of their early engines and other train-line components. Once the US started innovating for themselves, they understandably continued to use these standards, both so their existing stock (the engines and other accoutrement they bought from the UK) wouldn’t be rendered worthless, but also so they could do business with the UK, selling their new inventions and components back across the Atlantic.
The US didn’t have a truly standardized rail system at this point, though: the South used three different main rail gauges, and it’s thought that this inability to easily move trains from rail system to rail system, like they could in the North, contributed to the Confederacy’s eventual defeat.
After the Civil War, the victorious North began to rebuild things in the South, rebuilding to the single standard they’d long used: the one inherited from the British. This led to US-wide standardization that was locked in by the time war went global, and mid-20th Century, some of the infrastructure destroyed during WWII was rebuilt by the US under the Marshall Plan and other, similar international aid plans—hence, the abundance of new railroads, built to US standards.
It’s possible, of course, that anywhere along the way, this path of seeming inevitability could have been disrupted, and we’d consider whatever standard eventually took hold to be the obvious choice for international rail gauge measurements, instead of what we have now.
Think of all the disruptive technologies that have torn apart the up-to-that-point obvious trend-line of some technology—the CD being disrupted by the iPod and iTunes store, for instance—and it becomes easier to imagine how this story could have turned out differently.
That said, this path dependency-reliant way of thinking is pervasive, not obviously wrong, and can help us understand the great many variables that influence the direction things take.
Path dependency thinking is not a crystal ball, allowing us to predict with any accuracy what will happen next. But it can, at times, helps us understand at least some of what has happened already, and can help us think more broadly, and to notice and measure influences that may seem to be disconnected from what we’re looking at, but which in reality are connected, perhaps in important ways, across gulfs of both time and space.
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