Habit Substitution
#habits
Entrepreneurs often build products that are only marginally better, rarely ever 10x, than what exists in the market today. They believe because there is some small improvement, people will switch over from the alternatives.
Rarely do they win because user habits are a competitive advantage.
John Gourville, a professor of marketing at Harvard, went as far as to claim that "many innovations fail because consumers irrationally overvalue the old while they undervalue the new." This could also be dubbed the Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable principle.
His claim was for a company to own a market they must be at least 9x better than what exists today. We use the QWERTY keyboard not because it was the most efficient organization, but because the most efficient keyboard was only a marginal amount better in speed and accuracy. The cost to change habits and behaviors was much higher than the benefits it could provide.