Oh, so seven /leaderships/ is what's made the difference?

If a government did this (e.g., seven independent agencies competing for a moon landing), people would call it "fragmented," "uncoordinated," and "bureaucratic infighting."

> The benefit from having a 5% better product that hundreds of millions of people will use is worth the duplicated effort in the beginning. The numbers just make sense.

This assumes that the duplicated effort arrives at a solution that is better than if it were done by a single team.

> >If this were seven government funded teams solving the same problem

> The problem here is "government funded" - the trials are not rationalized by free-market economics. That is, a 5% better product in the end would not be worth seven competing developments initially.

I think you're saying that 5% is worth it when the free market does it, but 5% gain isn't when the government does it?

I'm hoping you're not because that's impossible - the end result is precisely the same

I'm a little lost as to why seven teams duplicating effort is more "efficient" in any sense of the word than one or two teams working iteratively toward the same goal.

If this were seven government funded teams solving the same problem, people would lose their minds over the 'waste' But when private companies do it, we call it efficient market competition. The duplication is the same - we just frame it differently.

Edit: fixed some typos caused by fat fingers on a phone keyboard

This is one of the key "inefficiencies" of the private sector - there might be one winner at the end of the day providing the product that fills the market niche, but there was always multiple competitors giving it a go in the mean time.

A recent example, Mitchell Hashimoto was pointing out that he wasn't "first to market" with his product(s), he was (at least) SEVENTH

> So, ATMs did impact bank teller jobs by a significant amount. A third of them were made redundant.

That's not quite my read - the original says per branch there was a 1/3 reduction, but your comment appears to say 1/3 total redundancy.

There was, according to the original, a 40% increase in number of branches, meaning a net increase in tellers (my math might be off though)

edit:

100 branches → 140 branches = +40%

100 tellers/branch → 67 tellers/branch = -33%

140 × 67 = 9,380

100 × 100 = 10,000

net difference -620 or just over 6% (loss)