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Comment by stinky613 | Hacker News Reader

That's great that it works for you, but 'widespread adoption'? Really? If you were to take a random sample of 100 computer users how many do you seriously think have adopted Dvorak?

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I think you misunderstand techiferous. This is what he said:

> “Dvorak […] failed.” If by failed you mean widespread adoption. But […] it’s a personal success for me.

I think by that, he meant, “yes, I agree that Dvorak failed, if ‘failed’ means not having widespread adoption. But I don’t agree with that definition of failure. Dvorak is actually not a failure, because I have used it successfully personally.”

techiferous means it failed to get widespread adoption but succeeded for him personally. In fact my story is remarkably similar. I adopted Dvorak around 1999 and have had no problems using it since. If I use a computer long-term I change the keyboard layout (but not the hardware). If I use a computer short-term I hunt and peck. For me personally it's been very successful.

Ah, that makes more sense. Thank you. Personally I don't see any keyboard layout displacing QWERTY. It's so entrenched in hardware, software, and people's minds. I think, if anything, it's more likely that voice recognition and things like Swype will displace traditional QWERTY typing. I can barely get family and friends to keep their phone or computer up to date despite it only taking a click here or there. A new keyboard layout? I may as well ask them to learn high level calculus. Even if we start by trying to teach an alternative layout to young children I just don't see it catching on.

IIRC, Dvorak has about 500,000 users worldwide.

Okay. If that's just food for thought, fine, but if that's an argument for widespread adoption it falls pretty short. In 2011 35% of the world's population were internet users according to a quick wikipedia reference source [1]. That's 2.45 billion people. Taking the 500,000 Dvorak users into account yields 1 Dvorak user out of every 4900 internet users. I realize these are all kind of soft numbers we're throwing around, but I feel my point stands.

[1] FWIW, http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/facts/2011/material/ICTFactsFig...

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