Technology adoption tends to follow a familiar S-shaped curve.
The bottom left is the starting point, where ideas become actual commercial products and customers start to buy them. Those first generation customers find enough value in the technology to generate further investment by others. In parallel, the manufacturer improves and matures the product based on the feedback from the customers and their own research and development efforts.
In the mid-part of the S, sales dramatically increase – more customers, more production, more funding, more profit, more improvement. Everything is going great.
The easy improvements have all been done by the top end of the S, and the potential population of new buyers has dwindled. It takes money and time to make any significant gains in performance and attracting new customers.
After more than 125 years of development, diesel engines in trucks often are cited as one of these mature technologies, with nearly 100% market share, where new significant improvements now require significant investments in time and money.
That simplistic view of technology diffusion works pretty well to explain winners, but not all horses seem to finish the race. For every great market and technology success, there are scores of, to put it politely, less successful ones. Ideas that seemed to have potential at a given moment in history, but for a variety of reasons just never measured up to expectations.
They make great fodder for historians and fuel for arguing over whether one new technology is better than another by comparison to some past failure.
