[petit_robert]

"But when you look at it as a probability rather than as an absolute, yes, you should expect more popular things to be better than less popular things, no? "

Possibly in areas where no serious money is involved, but I haven't experienced this in the big corporate/government world myself. It can occasionally be true, but it's certainly not the rule

[kbenson]

I think this generally applies in that case: "often what you find underneath is a mismatch between what the arguer thinks is better and what the people who chose the popular thing think is better."

A simple example of this would be going with the bloated, more expensive, more error prone product. It may just be that service contracts, existing relationships, available support or even just name recognition (Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft...) trump those in some cases.