Many people don’t know that The Road Not Taken was a sequel (or a prequel to be exact). The original was a story called Herbig-Haro set several decades later when humans were using the new FTL drive. Turtledove then decided to go bakc and write a story about how they got it. The original was never anthologized and the second story has become much better known than the first.
Are you sure it was an Asimov story? The description you gave sounds like Superiority which was written by Arthur Clarke.
The original description doesn’t sound like any Asimov story I’ve ever heard of, but it doesn’t sound like Superiority, either:
In Superiority, the two sides start out more or less evenly matched technologically, but then one side starts chasing ultra-tech advances. The results are impressive, but buggy, and the end result is that the other side (which kept building tried-and-true ships and weapons) wins the war after a truly horrendous bug causes all the ships on the first side to lose all contact with one another.
I’m pretty sure it was an Asimov story - and a short story at that. I’ll check around the web.
That just got ordered. I’ve been looking for this story for quite a while.