Why Lock Technology Stagnated for Decades

At BSides-LasVegas this year I saw an exemplary talk on the history of lock technology and lock picking. Not only was it informative, but it was highly entertaining as well.

At the end of the talk, the speaker had a question for the audience. After charting astounding progress in lock technology up through the 1860’s, locks basically stagnated after that point until the 2000’s, and he asked the audience why that was.

After he finished I approached him and told him I thought I knew the answer, which was that lock technology had simply reached a state of “good enough”, which reduced the require to innovate below the threshold of effort required to do so.

He smiled and said that he’d like to discuss it further with me.

Do any of you have any ideas on this, or are you able to more formally and properly describe the phenomenon that I am trying to capture?

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