I love Top Gear, it’s one of my favorite TV shows. Fast cars and British dudes making hilarious jokes is a damn good combination.
The picture above is from an episode when Top Gear tries to find the first car to have the standard set of pedals, gear shift, handbrake and steering wheel. It was really surprising to see them try many different cars and none of them had this setup. Each one was different: gas on the steering wheel, brake on the right, no pedals, two different ways to accelerate.
The first car to have a modern layout; clutch, brake, gas, gearshift, key, was the Cadillac Type 53, produced 8 years after the Model T! And most people think the Model T was the first ‘modern’ automobile.
The point I’m trying to make is that it took over 8 years and dozens of different types of configurations before we managed to figure out a good way to operate a car. During those 8 years there were hundreds of variations and prototypes. Some made it into production cars just to be thrown out the next year.
We’ve seen this this type of experimentation before with virtually every new technology. Hundreds or thousands of people figuring out how the hell to implement a new idea. TV, radio, computers, phones, engines. All had a significant amount of diversity and experimentation before some sort of a standard emerged.
So here’s my hypothesis:
The maturity of a technology is inversely proportional to the diversity of its implementations.
If you look around at any technology you use today, think about how many other types of implementations there are. The more there are, the more likely the technology is still maturing.
