The best product doesn't always win. The one everyone uses wins. Later we all tell ourselves a story about why and how that product was really the best all along in an impressive display of survivorship bias. In fact, the history of technology is littered with quantitatively superior products that lost in the marketplace because they weren't well timed, well marketed, or well supported: VHS vs Betamax. Gasoline vsElectric. English vs Esperanto. Metric vs Imperial.
"Habit and user expectation remains a stronger moat than people appreciate." - Ben Thompson
Winning products tend to continue to win until major disruption or mismanagement. The reason for that is simple: everyone else has to conform before they can compete. You become the de facto standard against which other things are measured. It is hard to differentiate for the better when people have already collectively endorsed a fiction that the best solution has already been found (and, what luck, it's the one that won). Society is a dynamic part of product/market fit, and once a large number of humans have learned come to expect a certain behavior, there just isn't enough value in learning a new system even if it is better. This isn't just about switching costs between products but rather more fundamentally about interaction paradigms. Do you reallythink an app garden is the apex of all possible phone UIs? Is a vertical scrolling feed really the best way to stay up to date on friends? Does the QWERTY arrangement on a keyboard make any sense today?
This is the reason companies focus so much on growth. It isn't just that growth signifies a fit with a market. But rather because growth actually makes the market fit stronger. Even when the product doesn't involve network effects directly it still benefits from the habits and expectations of the population at large that accompany growth.
译文：
生存偏差和增长
最好的产品不一定总能胜出。每个人使用的都是双赢。后来，我们都给自己讲了一个故事，关于这个产品为什么和如何在一个令人印象深刻的生存偏差中一直是最好的。事实上，技术的历史上充斥着大量的优质产品，这些产品在市场上失去了价值，因为它们没有很好的时机，没有很好的营销，也没有得到很好的支持:VHS vs Betamax。汽油和电。英语和世界语。度量与帝国。
“习惯和用户期望仍然比人们欣赏的更强烈。”——本•汤普森
获胜的产品往往会继续获胜，直到出现重大混乱或管理不善。原因很简单:在竞争之前，其他人都必须循规蹈矩。你成为衡量其他事物的事实标准。当人们已经集体支持一种已经找到了最佳解决方案的假设时，就很难区分出更好的方案(而且，幸运的是，这个方案获得了成功)。社会是产品/市场匹配的一个动态部分，一旦大量的人学会了对某种行为的期望，即使新系统更好，学习它也没有足够的价值。这不仅仅是关于在产品之间转换成本，更重要的是关于交互范式。你真的认为一个应用程序花园是所有可能的电话ui的顶点吗?垂直滚动的feed真的是了解朋友的最好方式吗?现在键盘上的QWERTY排列有意义吗?
这就是企业如此关注增长的原因。不仅仅是增长意味着与市场相适应。而是因为增长实际上使市场变得更强大。即使产品不直接涉及网络效应，它仍然会受益于伴随增长而来的大量人口的习惯和期望。
取得最终胜利的往往不是最好的产品；取得最终胜利的是人人都在用的产品。Growth 的意义也是为了让 product 与 market 更 fit；用的人多了、用户习惯养成了，就是好产品。