Almost everyone has heard that the QWERTY keyboard was designed to slow typists down. It is one of those facts that gets repeated so often it feels true. It is not quite right, but the more interesting part of the story is not why it was designed the way it was. It is what happened next.
In the 1930s, a researcher named August Dvorak designed a keyboard layout that was demonstrably faster and less fatiguing than QWERTY. It went nowhere. By the time he finished his work, tens of millions of people had learned QWERTY, every manufacturer had standardized around it, and nobody wanted to have the conversation. The cost of changing felt too high. The cost of not changing never got calculated.
That second number is the one most businesses never look at.
I was in a client’s warehouse recently and found a machine running Windows 7. Microsoft stopped issuing security patches for it in January 2020. The software it runs has not been updated since the vendor discontinued it years ago. The machine is connected to the business network. Nobody had made a decision to leave it that way. The project to replace it had simply been pushed to next quarter enough times that next quarter stopped arriving. The operation ran, nothing had visibly broken, and so the question never got asked.
That is how it usually goes. The cost of not changing rarely announces itself. It shows up in other ways. Security exposure that accumulates quietly in the background. Staff time absorbed by workarounds that have been in place so long they feel like standard procedure. Growth that stalls because the tools cannot scale with the business. None of it looks like a technology problem from the inside. It looks like how the job gets done.
Change is disruptive and the cost is real. But the cost of not changing is also real, and unlike the cost of a migration project, nobody sends you an invoice for it. It just runs.
If you have technology in your environment that has not been seriously evaluated because the project keeps getting pushed, that is worth an honest look. The number is almost always different than what people assume.
Until next time, keep IT simple.
Dave
