] Traditional concepts of scale economies applied to
] production--the more steel you made, the more cheaply you
] could make each additional ton, because fixed costs can
] be spread. Much of the path-dependence literature is
] concerned with economies of consumption, where a good
] becomes cheaper or more valuable to the consumer as more
] other people also have it; if lots of people have DOS
] computers, then more software will be available for such
] machines, for instance, which makes DOS computers better
] for consumers. This sort of "network externality" is even
] more important when literal networks are involved, as
] with phones or fax machines, where the value of the good
] depends in part on how many other people you can connect
] to.

an interesting discussion of market dependancies, false memes, and other nefarious imperfections which seem to dominate us.