Learn it while it is still worse

A good locksmith in Bur Dubai can open almost any door with a ring of picks and a steady hand. When keypad locks start appearing on villa doors, he has every reason to wave them away.

They are fiddly. The batteries die. The cheap ones stick in the summer heat, and the dear ones want a phone app nobody trusts. Next to a heavy brass lock, they look like a toy.

He is right about all of it, and it does not matter.

Every new way of doing something turns up at a disadvantage. The old way has had decades to grow its habits, its suppliers, its spare parts and its people who know exactly what to do. The new way has none of that yet. Of course it loses the first comparison.

The trouble is that somebody else is not waiting for it to win. A younger locksmith a few streets away spends a slow season learning how the keypads fail and how to reset them. He finds the wholesaler. He learns which models survive the summer. When the locks improve, and they do, the building managers already have his number saved.

Waiting until the new thing beats the old thing feels prudent. It is usually the most expensive choice available, because by then the learning has been done by someone else, and the customers went where the learning was.

I think there are two moments worth watching for. When the new way works about half as well, it deserves to be understood properly, with your own hands and on your own time. When it is most of the way there, somewhere around three quarters, it deserves something built around it: a service, a sideline, a different way of working.

There is no third moment. Once it has caught up, you are either part of it already or you are watching from the pavement.