In 1989 I answered my first mobile phone call on Oxford Street using a brick-sized Motorola borrowed from work. Several people shouted abuse at me from passing cars.
Back then, it was also rare to make a mobile-to-mobile call. If you did, it was the main topic of conversation for the first few minutes: ‘Where are you?’ ‘On a boat.’ ‘Wow, I’m on a train going through Leighton Buzzard.’ And you’d laugh at the absurdity of the whole thing.
The world’s most ludicrous object is the stemmed wine glass. Why does this idiotic item persist?
Now let’s imagine that, owing to a technological limitation, early cellphones hadn’t offered interconnectivity with the fixed-line network. Adoption might have been delayed by ten years or more. In 1989 people would have known too few cellphone users to make it worthwhile. The same effect did stall the spread of the fax machine. Until hitting critical mass in the mid-1980s, it was underused for decades. It pays to read Douglas McWilliams to understand such network effects: valuable technologies often languish for years beneath the threshold of widespread adoption.
This same friction applies in reverse. Once they reach scale, network goods persist for too long through sheer ubiquity. There is a group of scientists who believe hydrogen should be the future of clean transportation. But they also fear that once hydrogen power has reached its potential, electric charging infrastructure will be so deeply entrenched, it will be impossible to unseat.
Typically, study of such effects has focused on technology and utilities — asking whether online search, say, is a natural monopoly. Mainstream thinkers have historically seen markets through the lens of ‘methodological individualism’, assuming that individual preferences neatly aggregate into collective behaviour. I think this is an error.
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