Is there a historical reason for a pattern of worse technological standards beating out better ones?
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There's a few possibilities, the first and most obvious is inertia.
Let's take a look at metric vs imperial.
By adoption, the overwhelming majority of the world and the scientific community uses metric. It is widely acknowledged that metric makes conversions and calculations much easier, and conversions have even taken out a NASA orbiter, costing the agency to the tune of $125 million
However, Imperial is not dying out any time in the United States.
Why is that?
There's a significant cost to switch. At the minimum, all 100,000 miles of highways in the US has to have all its signage replaced.
Just like the NASA incident, the transition is all but guaranteed to cause a lot of damage due to human error.
Old equipment cannot be magically recaliberated, so even if you accomplish the 1st two, you probably will still end up with the old units hiding in the new, which makes metric's "easy to convert" advantage useless. You can see this from gun calibers - 5.56mm, 7.62mm, 11.43mm, 12.7mm - these are .22, .30, .45 and .50 inches respectively. Just because you "converted it" to metric does mean the old chambers and barrels will magically give you nice round numbers (except maybe .40 and 10mm), and small arms will keep those relics up for a long time and you'll still have to do awkward math - now with 4 digits!
Also, it helps that the United States is the world's foremost economic power, so most people are willing to accommodate the US than vice versa.
The second is simply what you think is the superior standard may not be - all techs have drawbacks, and what you think might be a minor inconvenience might be a dealbreaker for most, or that something you find useless may be very important to others (Windows and Backwards Compatibility comes to mind for this one).
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Source: stackoverflow.com
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