I was 80wpm sustained, 100wpm burst on qwerty.
In a month I was ~50 on dvorak but my speed in qwerty dropped to about 50 and took a good 2-5 minutes to get back into.

It’s 2 years later and my RSI went away and I can easily type in both layouts. Here are my approx speeds.

~60-80 qwerty
~60 dvorak

The speeds on each get better the more I type in one layout and get worse the longer I use the opposite one. Nowadays I am done university (writing essays and such) and haven’t worked in a job with lots of typing for a couple years, so my typing skills lag behind. I have three computers set up at home right now. One uses dvorak, one is on qwerty because it was just nuke/paved and one is not mine so it’s on qwerty. I switch between them almost without thinking now. I’ll type the first 5 letters and it’ll be jibberish so without thinking my hands backspace it and my brain switches gears.

Long story short:

- Took a month to learn
- I can interchange between layouts with no problem
- my typing speeds are slower, but I feel this is a result of a change in my lifestyle rather than because I changed layouts

On that last point. not only do I write less reports, IM among my friends has gone out of style) If I were to spend a few months with a good typing program, I feel I could bring the qwerty back to 80 and 100 burst, but the dvorak would exceed it because I make fewer errors in dvorak. My qwerty speeds have always been held back by my insanely high error rate (I’ve busted for 20 seconds up to the 120/130 range in qwerty when I don’t make any mistakes)

So, this addresses your point #2 “Difficult to learn”. It took me about 3 weeks to feel solid on the keyboard, although my WPM were still around 40-45 after that. My trick was that I almost completely used Dvorak and wouldn’t allow myself to use QWERTY. Also, I used IM a lot at the time, which requires you to type reasonably fast but is very forgiving of mistakes.

I surpassed my previous WPM in about 3 months, and kept getting faster. I levelled off at about 110-120 WPM after about a year, so I got about a 200% return on my 3 month investment over the last 5 years. Not too shabby, I don’t think.

The main problems I’ve had are typing passwords when I’m on someone else’s QWERTY computer, and ease of Cut/Copy/Paste/Undo, but you find ways to compensate, like with anything. Still, it’s not for everyone.

Also, getting a Dvorak keyboard really isn’t necessary, there’s no real benefit to using one. Just look for a keyboard that’s ergonomic and comfortable.

Seriously, though, you are right on about the business and marketing application here. I think that another way to think about it is this–it’s not good enough to have a clearly superior product. You also have to factor in the amount of change required for customers to switch to your product. If I already type so quickly, why would I want to go through an agonizing period of decreased productivity?