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Why VHS Was Better Than Betamax
Vladimir Kornea writes "This article argues that 'when someone buys and uses a product, the technological aspects are a small and often uninteresting part of the decision' and that the when the 'whole product' (a term commonly used among marketing people) is considered, VHS was better than Betamax, and that the Wintel PC is better than the alternatives." Update: 01/29 04:26 GMT by T : Apologies for the dupe.
Didn't this story run like yesterday?
oh wait... dupe
second post!
Just posted Sunday: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/01/26/028207
So I can understand how some of the more popular topics get posted more than once, but a topic like this isn't really big news.
Do the editors ever even bother to look at the front page? Are there people who resubmit stories time after time just so we can make fun of the editors posting dupes?
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/01/26/028207 &mode=thread&tid=126
Two days ago.
Cause you could watch stuff over and over again in nice, compact, tape-form and not have to carry around an entire computer to see the same thing day after day.....
news for amnesiacs, stuff that mattered
'nuff said
Is this my imagination, or is this a duplicate?? btw, FIRST POST
more about me
know what i mean little timothy?
wink, wink, nudge nudge... say no more.
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
what a c0xs0x37 'nuff said most people here in the u.s. drive g.m. autos -- does that make them best?
---
Information wants...you to shut your pie hole.
Old article
Ah it seems like only yesterday I was reading this very same story.
I guess it just goes to prove that there's nothing new under the sun...
or is it that the technology news cycle is simply accelerating to the point where upgrades, viruses, security patches and new releases, reports and share market fluctuations are passing us by at such a rate that it only seems like we're reading yesterday's news today?
Perhaps this is where all that dark matter really is residing...
I'll stop now.
I am a leaf on the wind
there's nothing better than reading something one day, and then getting a refresher again the next day... hey, and there's all new posts now too!!!
cowboyneal rocks!!!!!
-isolens
and all /. editors know this:
Better Copies.
Doing a search on this exact title would have shown that this was repeated just 2 days ago. Good old timothy... why bother searching when you can just wait for him to repost it?
I browse Slashdot at +3, Funny
Definately a dupe!
This is unbelievable!! One should figure out the ratio of fresh postings to dupes... http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/01/26/028207 &mode=thread&tid=126
Duplicate posts are designed to drive just enough people mad that slashdot ceases to be stupid.
And by stupid, I don't mean the people *running* it.
sig not found
Blah, blah, blah --
How dare I be forced to see this headline again... after all, I pay good money to Slashdot!
...like an old retread.
I feel for anyone actually giving money to this site....why, oh why would you put up with this? Not only can you get the original stories from Wired, NYT, CNN, etc, this site laughs while it rakes in ad money. What a joke.
http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=vhs
And a URL I'd like to see: http://nodupe.slashdot.org
They're too busy taking over the company I "work" for.
VHS was better in the same sense that the Model T Ford was better. It was cheaper, mass-produced, and more easily obtainable by the average Joe. Betamax was a technically superior format, with cleaner chrominance and luminance signal encoding/decoding to/from the tape, but Sony was just too expensive and arrogant with the Betamax's market positioning. They could've mass-produced them more cheaply to compete, but failed to do so in the very beginning, when timing and window of opportunity for establishing the dominant format was critical.
survival of the fittest (Score:5, Insightful)
k )
;-)
...the marketplace should never be open to formats which are almost direct replacements for previous formats.
k )
:)
by Interfacer (560564) on Sunday January 26, @07:16AM (#5161151)
a lot of people are confused about this phrase, thinking of 'fit' as being technical superior.
in fact the term fit does have nothing to do with that, but should be interpreted as 'fitted for a certain purpose'
for example one of the reasons that windows version whatever is so popular with computer iliterate persons is that it takes you by the hand to do a lot of things, which can be a pain for power users, but not for newbies. in that sense windows is most 'fitted' for that situation, just as linux is for power users, server systems, or as BSD on powerful stable systems with 1000's of connections at a time.
other examples are software programming where C++ can be the best solution for developing algorithms, and VB for simple DB connected user interfaces.
the 'fittest' solution survives in the place where it is used at its best. C is not 'better' than VB. it is fit for other purposes than VB.
you can only talk about 'better' when two things are designed for the exact same purpose.
Interfacer.
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The only convincing bit was... (Score:5, Insightful)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 26, @07:20AM (#5161164)
When they were released, betamax had only 1 hour tapes.. VHS had two hour tapes...
You could record a film onto VHS... which you couldn't do with beta unless you were sitting in front of it to change the tapes halfway through.
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This will continue (Score:5, Interesting)
by indigogorge.net (535856) on Sunday January 26, @07:24AM (#5161172)
As long as some companies try to make everyone buy proprietary products, this will happen. VHS was not better than BetaMax. Sony simply did not want to share. Hence, VHS was more widely accepted because everyone could buy a VHS player, and not a very pricy BetaMax player. If you looked at minidisk 12 years ago, when CDs where starting to come out, they offered the same capacity, and so many more features. But in the End, it was cheaper for people to buy CDs, instead of buying proprietary expensive Sony only players and products. Same thing with sony memorystick. Make it an open source product, and just collect license fees, or what have you. Then everyone will use it if it is a good thing. I'm sure there are a lot more companies like this, but I just picked on Sony because it is their original product.
-----A lesson the Linux worlds needs to learn (Score:5, Insightful)
by rufusdufus (450462) on Sunday January 26, @07:25AM (#5161173)
The value of a product is not defined by its creators. It is defined by its market. Meaning its users and customers.
Linux is doomed to be a niche player until this fact is more widely accepted. It doesn't matter what geeks think about the product if the end user is not satisfied, overjoyed even.
As it is today, woe to any newbie who wants to jump on the linux bandwagon; all they get is name calling and static when they have real problems. The overall experience can be very unpleasant.
[ Reply to This ]
Re:A lesson the Linux worlds needs to learn (Score:5, Insightful)
by reallocate (142797) on Sunday January 26, @07:48AM (#5161223)
True, true. I'd add that most geeks also seem to expect computer users to progress from a newbie state (Windows) to a "power user" state" Linux. In other words, they expect the customer to change rather than the product.
What they seem to fail to understand is that many, if not most computer users, aren't that interested in computers, no more than they have an abiding interest in how television works. Its "what" it enables them to do, not how it does it, that counts.
------
He's right... He's wrong... (Score:5, Interesting)
by Jayson (2343) on Sunday January 26, @07:27AM (#5161179)
(http://www.xcf.berkeley.edu/~nordwic
He says that geeks don't understand about the total package and that technical ability isn't the only thing. He's right in that is what geeks say. However, geeks do realize this, but they just don't know it.
From an example taken from The Other Site [kuro5hin.org] in the last day: programming languages. People will willingly use broken languages, not as superior, because they interface to more things, can be applied to more general purpose situations (even when they shouldn't be), or have bigger libraries. You only need to look to Perl and C.
Perl is an attrocious language judging on purely technical merits, however CPAN and all the sugar it has are what give people reason to use it. You will often hear the C or Perl apologist say, "it does what I need good enough" or "I get work done in it." This is almost the same decision calculous that the author is expousing: people chose VHS because it did what they needed (recording a two hour movie unattended) and it did it well enough (they couldn't tell the difference in image quality).
[ Reply to This ]
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Its not just the technical (Score:5, Interesting)
by locarecords.com (601843) on Sunday January 26, @07:41AM (#5161208)
(http://www.locarecords.com/ | Last Journal: Monday August 26, @07:35AM)
I think this is an important point when creating technical projects - it is not just the technical specifications that sell a product (well for non-slashdot readers anyway
I don't know if anyone has come across the writer Bruno Latour but he argues convincingly that we need a more complex understanding of the way technology projects are started, run and completed in order to understand why certain technical decisions are made. Afterall there can be cost constraints, efficiency constraints, material constraints, management constraints, organisational constraints (ie we don't do it like that here) and so on and on.
The phrase heterogeneous engineering is a great term that refers to the way technical people have to engineer not just, say, the software, but also the managers, other people, organisational lethagy and so on just to get the thing out of the drawing room (let alone the door).
I remember working for a very prestigious and large media company who could not see the value of the Internet whatso ever. No matter how much I banged on about it. In the end I left as it was clear the managers and company were still living in the land of VAX/VMS... Shit they were *still* worrying about X25!
But it is interesting how we as engineers have to have the social skills as well as technical skills in order to move a project forward... and that can be much harder than the technical!
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Tomorrow on Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
by SlashdotLemming (640272) on Sunday January 26, @07:50AM (#5161225)
Why Iron was better than Bronze
-----
Random VHS fact! (Score:5, Informative)
by iamdrscience (541136) on Sunday January 26, @08:00AM (#5161239)
(http://itsbeenconfirmed.com/)
Ever wonder what VHS stands for?
It stands for Vertical Helix Scan
------
Acronyms Change With Time! (Score:5, Interesting)
by CharlieO (572028) on Sunday January 26, @08:09PM (#5164509)
There is a remarkable phenmenom with technical acronyms.
Thier meaning shifts over time. Mainly this is because the technology they describe becomes successful and the meaning of the orginal expansion is no longer valid. However the acronym is firmly rooted almost like a brand name, so usually the expansion is changed.
For instance VHS did originally expand to Vertical Helical Scan - which is a description of the way that the enigineering team solved how keep the tape speed over the head high without having to have the tape itself spooling at hig speed and therefor needing a huge amount of it.
Later as it became popular and mass market the expansion changed to Video Home System as this was more understandable for the consumer.
Video Home System (a less daunting rendering of the original acronym, which stood for Vertical Helical Scan)
Reference : Baird to MPEG A History Of Video [transdiffusion.org]
Look at the GSM [gsmworld.com] mobile phone standard. Orignially this stood for Group Spécial Mobile [handytel.com] - a special interest of the CEPT set up to develop one digital standard, based on the existing ISDN standard,for mobile phones in Europe to replace the mess of competing analogue ones.
Nowadays, given the massive success of the standard the expansion is Global System for Mobile communications [handytel.com].
DECT [www.dect.ch] originally stood for Digital European Cordless Terminal [handytel.com]. For the non Europeans its a standard for short range digital handset to base station communication for cordless phones. Being a standard you can now buy extra handsets from whoever you want, and things like wireless modems. As its success took off and it began to be used outside of Europe then the expansion changed to Digital Enhanced Cordless Terminal [handytel.com]
As mentioned elsewher in this thread DVD originally stood for Digital Video Disc but as it became apparent that a high capacity replacement for CD could have many uses it was renamed to Digital Versatile Disc with the convention that the specific use is tagged afterwards, hence DVD-Video, DVD-RAM, DVD-ROM, DVD-Audio The moral of the story is be careful what you state an acronym stands for - a whole load of them in daily use have stood for a number of things in thier history!!
Oh, and yes I do currently work in the telecoms side of it, how did you guess??
------
V2000 (Score:5, Interesting)
by grundie (220908) on Sunday January 26, @08:40AM (#5161325)
To hell with Betamax and VHS. Philips V2000 format was better than the both of them. It had double sided tapes, supeior picture quality, embedded timecode and really long tapes. It was years ahead of both Betamax and VHS. I'm surprised the author of the article didn't llok in to V2000 as it was quite popular in Britain for a while, before losing the marketing battle.
As to the comparisons between VHS and Beta, I think the author makes a big blunder about VHS's success. I recall a TV interview with Alan Sugar, the founder of Amstrad which is a UK stack em high, sell em cheap electronics manufacturer. In the interview he said that his decision to make VHS machines in the early 80's was down to the fact that JVC offered him much more attractive licensing terms to use VHS as opposed to Sony who wanted twice as much for the Betamax system. Although market forces may have had an effect, surely VHS's success was more to do with the bigger profit margins it made for the manufacturers? Thus causing VHS to be promoted more at the expense of Betamax.
------
So using this theory... (Score:5, Insightful)
by Delusion- (153011) on Sunday January 26, @09:13AM (#5161404)
In 1973, when the Compact Disc was introduced, the "infrastructure of capabilities, services, and support" for analog audio cassettes - prerecorded and otherwise - was vastly superior to that of the audio cassette. The CD prevailed despite the fact that there was no ability to record - analog cassette recorders are now most often encountered as unused legacy devices on multi-function audio hardware.
This "whole product" theory is an unenlightening justification for the emerging popularity of specific standards - it's the best product because it's the one most people buy? While there's truth to this, this fact is often less interesting than examining WHY this is the case.
If the technical standards of Betamax were superior to VHS - and they were - it's more useful to examine why these did not produce the dominant product than it is just to hand-wave the issue by saying that the best product is that which everyone else ended up buying. Any discussion of VHS versus BetaMax that doesn't discuss the fact that Sony wouldn't license its format to adult video studios misses another important aspect of why formats emerge and gain dominance over existing formats - the 'killer ap'.
The fact that he dismisses DAT audio with his "whole product" argument does not strengthen it in the least. The DAT cassette was a product the market was eager and ready for, and the more passive segment of the consumer base would have eventually caught up with the geeks, audiophiles, and techs. The RIAA crippled the format before it reached the consumer by disabling digital-to-digital copying, which given the dominance of the audio cassette DESPITE noted technical deficiencies (fragility, sound quality on normal-bias cassettes, less convenience for liner notes than vinyl), would have been an easy sell to a consumer base used to direct copying. Score one for the RIAA.
Enter MP3s. I've argued that the MP3 format is the just revenge of the marketplace against the deliberate crippling of DAT audio by the RIAA. The MP3 format became popular for technical reasons and became ubiquitous because the "whole product" was exactly what the marketplace had wanted and needed ever since the pre-recorded music industry moved to a read-only CD format - a high fidelity means of audio dubbing free from the limitations and physical fragility of analog cassettes. Had the RIAA had computer audio formats on its radar before it became a consumer reality, have no doubt that it, too, would have been a great idea that never made it to the broader marketplace.
The argument isn't, and never has been that BetaMax was the "better" format or that it was more suitable for the marketplace - the argument is that, based on wholly technical anaysis, it delivered a better performance than VHS. The VHS standard won out because RCA didn't keep their product a proprietary standard subject to its licensing regieme, because of porn as the 'killer ap' among early VHS adopters, because it was a cheaper product to adopt for end-users as well as studios (related to the license issue), and because as more manufacturers developed for what was effectively an open standard, they developed features to get their products noticed which in many cases became standards - multiple recording speeds, for instance. There's no reason why, if the BetaMax standard were open, a savvy competetor in the market could have developed multiple recording speeds. Sony felt it had a say in this matter, RCA didn't.
While the "whole product" isn't a completely invalid method of analyzing competing formats, it is as narrow a look at a larger issue as solely focusing on the technical specs, and is particularly poorly-suited toward determining why a particular format bucks the trend of the status quo and gains market dominance.
If "whole product" were the whole story, we'd probably have never gotten to VHS or BetaMax, and Laser Disc and DVD would have been
------
Not at all... (Score:5, Insightful)
by Jayson (2343) on Sunday January 26, @07:20AM (#5161163)
(http://www.xcf.berkeley.edu/~nordwic
He argues that Betamax was actually more popular when it began, and they had a "defacto monopoly from tape incompatabilities." The author says that the reason Betamax lost the market was that it didn't do what the consumer wanted, to be able to record an entire movie unattended due to their one hour tape versus the VHS two hour tape. He has some other arguments, such as the Betamax was originally higher priced (and was cheaper, but only after losing market too much market share to matter).
His point wasn't that you can look at a single factor (e.g., popularity), but you have to weight products more holistically.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
Re:Not at all... (Score:5, Insightful)
by orthogonal (588627) on Sunday January 26, @08:04AM (#5161255)
The author says that the reason Betamax lost the market was that it didn't do what the consumer wanted, to be able to record an entire movie unattended due to their one hour tape versus the VHS two hour tape. He has some other arguments, such as the Betamax was originally higher priced....
Hmmm. Makes me think of MP3s versus CDs. I listen to all of my music on MP3, despite having a (Sony, ironically enough!) 50 CD "jukebox".
Why do I sacrifice quality by listening to MP3s rather than CDs?
Convenience: I can easily set up arbitrarily long, arbitrarily ordered MP3 playlists, and without the time it takes for the "jukebox" to physically chnage CDs.
Greater selection at cheaper prices. While I do not and will not download MP3s to which I don't have a license, I can and do subscribe to emusic.com. This gives me an excellent selection of medium quality (128 kbps) MP3s, far more than I could afford as CDs -- and far more than I'd be tempted to "try out", buying CDs I might later find out didn't justify a $10-$20 price tag.
Portability: Carrying around a portable CD player generally resulted in my listening to a single CD, over and over, as carrying additional CDs was inconvenient (see reason #1, above) and resulted in losing numerous Cds. carrying around my Archos MP3 player gives my my entire music collection (currently about 14 GBs in MP3 format) in my pocket.
Quality: I can't easily hear the difference in quality between a CD and an MP3, even when the MP3 is piped through the (now empty) "jukebox"'s speakers. To the extent that I can hear the difference, I prefer to indulge my eclectic musical taste in quantity rather than fewer selections in quality. Your mileage will undoutedly vary.
Quality's important, don't misunderstand me. But let me chicken out by closing with a few choice cliches: Often the best is the enemy of the good, and enough (quality, ironically, not quantity) is as good as a feast, and more than enough is as bad as a surfeit.
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Re:Not this crap again. (Score:5, Insightful)
by melonman (608440) on Sunday January 26, @07:29AM (#5161187)
(http://www.cyberporte.co.uk/ | Last Journal: Saturday December 14, @07:35AM)
but then simply states that, despite all of its advantages, VHS is still better because it's more popular.
There whas a bit more to his argument than that:
VHS offered a bigger choice of hardware at lower cost, the tapes were cheaper and more easily available, there were a lot more movies to rent, and so on.
Those sound like three quite important arguments to me, unless money is no object, you like buying hardware from a de facto monopoly, hunting for media is your idea of fun and you don't actually want to watch movies, just admire the spec.
A bit further on, he points out another specific flaw in Sony's market research:
Sony got one simple decision wrong. It chose to make smaller, neater tapes that lasted for an hour, whereas the VHS manufacturers used basically the same technology with a bulkier tape that lasted two hours.
Now I don't know a lot about the details, but would it have been that hard for Sony to provide essentially the same technology with a larger box and a longer tape? As the article continues:
Their spouses/children/grandparents and everybody else would quickly have told them the truth. "We're going out tonight and I want to record a movie. That Betamax tape is useless: it isn't long enough. Get rid of it."
And that's the basis problem with the general population who decide which products succeed by their purchasing decisions: they see technology as a means to an end, not as something to admire for its intrinsic cleverness.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
Re:Not this crap again. (Score:5, Insightful)
by melonman (608440) on Sunday January 26, @08:28AM (#5161295)
(http://www.cyberporte.co.uk/ | Last Journal: Saturday December 14, @07:35AM)
But none of those are technological reasons.
I would have thought that the storage capacity was quite an important technological criterion for a storage medium. If the technology is for home recording, and the tape it too short to record what a lot of people what to record, ie full-length films, isn't that a bit of a drawback? I have to say that I'd rather see all of a film at less than perfect quality than all but the last 20 minutes of a film at wonderful quality.
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Re:Not this crap again. (Score:5, Insightful)
by nehril (115874) on Sunday January 26, @07:39AM (#5161201)
I think the image quality differences are a big deal only to a very small segment. The difference between VHS's "good" and BetaMax's "great" is lost on most people. good is good enough. people will opt for lossy "compression" for the sake of more content (witness the MP3 format's success.) consider that even with vhs most people will record at whatever level gives them the longest record time, sacrificing quality.
Ask the average tivo owner what quality level they select for their seinfeld reruns. VHS won because it gave people more of less, in a way. Just like McDonalds makes money hand over fist serving "food" that would make a french chef gag.
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Re:Not this crap again. (Score:5, Insightful)
by roybadami (515249) on Sunday January 26, @08:36AM (#5161314)
And he has a pop at linux, but linux isn't meant to be a whole product
Well, not directly. He does say that Wintel is the best whole product, and for many classes of users it currently is. That doesn't mean we can't change that, though.
It's also interesting to apply the whole product anaysis to infrastructure services. For many services, Linux or UNIX of some flavour is clearly the best whole product. It comes with the infrastructure services you need as standard (mail servers, DNS servers, etc), and there's a huge support network of people out there using these UNIX tools in a native UNIX environment. Yes, you *can* run these tools under Wintel, but Linux/UNIX is the best whole product.
I can take gleeful delight in pointing out Timothy's errors...
oh, wait... dammit all I DID make a mistake once!
dammit all to heck and back.
I am a leaf on the wind
I I think think this this might might be be a a duplicate duplicate
There are 10 kinds of people; those who know ternary, those who don't, and those now hunting for a dictionary.
Hey timothy, you should read slashdot.org sometime. They cover a lot of the same stuff.
...that there's all these duplicate comments complaining about how the story is a duplicate story...
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
Ever wonder why slashdot won't fire his ass? I know that he is Chris Burke from Life goes on. But I still expect better.
Nothing good to add, just thought I'd post to say that timmay is a FUCKING IDIOT for not noticing this dupe. Moderate this as +1, Underrated.
From Fark, last week, and from Slashdot, day before yesterday.
Almost all "troll" or "flaimbait" moderations will be m2ed as unfair.
...for timothy to finish looking at his fresh porn so that he can check back and see that his new story wasn't so new after all.
Please remember to wash your hands timothy.
Lets all band together to post meaningless off-topic ramblings when the editors post duplicate stories... that'll learn 'em
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
From: hsm@unislc.slc.unisys.com (Helge Moulding)
Subject: AFU Whitepaper: The Decline and Fall of Betamax (Long)
Date: Wed, 8 May 1996 19:34:04 GMT
AFU White Paper: The Decline and Fall of Betamax
The story of Sony's Betamax (TM) format is not an isolated one, but it is instructive. It is also surrounded by legend and myth, so a closer look at it might be useful.
Getting To the Table
The story begins long before 1974, when the technology to record video data on magnetic tape was maturing. By itself, it doesn't sound like a daunting task, until the sheer volume of data is considered. There is a practical limit to the speed with which magnetic tape can be transported past the read/write heads of a record/playback machine; this limit was overcome almost a decade before Sony's home market debut by designing a head that turned past the tape, and wrote it's information on the tape at an angle.
If you've ever peered inside your VCR and wondered why that silvery cylinder back in there wasn't sitting straight, you know now that the basic technology hasn't changed in thirty years.
By the 1970s there were several Japanese industry giants poised to deliver home video taping equipment. These machines had to be orders of magnitude more reliable than the clumsy existing professional machines, and Sony was the first to consider their efforts market ready. According to James Lardner, author of _Fast Forward_ (New American Library), Sony invited Matsushita and JVC to license the Betamax technology in December 1974. [1]
Sony's Morita was apparently not aware that JVC was almost ready to market their own machine, so may have come as a rude surprise to him when JVC and Matsushita declined the offer. JVC believed it had a better product, and didn't see that the Betamax offered anything new. Moreover, Sony's overbearing attitude in this meeting may have made a definite impression on JVC's engineers.
Upping the Ante
In any case, for a year Sony had the VCR market to itself, selling 30,000 Betamax VCRs in the US. [2] But when JVC came out with the VHS format VCR in 1976, the stage was set for the format wars. JVC had a machine that already doubled Sony's recording time of one hour, and that difference would prove crucial.
By January 1977, JVC was joined by four more Japanese electronics manufacturers to build and market VHS format VCRs. Then, in February, Sony abandoned its long-standing policy against OEM deals and joined forces with Zenith.
Matsushita struck back by attempting to recruit RCA. RCA indicated that the VHS recording limit of two hours should be increased to three or four, and six weeks later, a prototype was ready. In March RCA joined the VHS camp.
Bidding for the Customer
While price later was less of a factor, in 1977 the VHS manufacturers, led by Matsushita, got into the trenches. VCR prices dropped as they became cheaper to make. RCA led by dropping prices $300 below the Sony machine, which caused an avalanche of follow-on price cutting. Eventually even Sony was forced to drop its price by $200. By 1982 the price war was in full swing, and Sony was offering a $50 dollar rebate as a "Home Improvement Grant." [6]
The comments from the sidelines were fairly equinamous. In September 1977, the Saturday Review declared that "Eventually, the public learned to live with two record speeds [33 1/3 and 45 rpm], and doubtless it will also resign itself to two videotape systems."
If nothing else, these comments showed that industry observers themselves hadn't a clue about the technology involved in the VCR.
An Unexpected Joker
Few bits of USAn history are complete without involving lawyers. In 1979, a suit brought against Sony by Universal Studios and Disney was getting into final arguments. At stake was the question if manufacturers of VCRs were infringing on the copyrights of producers of movies and TV programs.
The suit, which named only Sony, eventually left Universal and Disney with no recourse except to consider how to make money from the new technology. Sales of VCRs were apparently unaffected by talk of the legal procedings.
However, even as late as September 1980, the word "Betamax" was used by many as synonymous with "VCR." [3] It is possible that the court case had consequences on Sony's marketing that have never been considered. This is particularly notable when combined with the fact that Sony's share of the VCR market had sunk to 19.1% in 1978, compared to RCA's share of almost twice that at 36%.
Who's Stuck With the Old Maid?
As Sony's market share declined, the manufacturers of prerecorded VCR tapes began to adjust their product lines. Already in January, 1981, Betamax format VCRs accounted for merely 25% of the entire market, and consumers were being warned that the selection for VHS would be "slightly broader." [4]
The Finessed King
Technologically, the two formats were each other's equal. True, except for the recording length, Sony pioneered most of the improvements over the years, but the VHS manufacturers caught up to each improvement, usually in less than a year. So, for instance, within a month of Sony's announcement of Beta Hi-Fi, JVC and Panasonsic announced VHS Hi-Fi formats. Interestingly, the two VHS formats were incompatible with each other. [7]
Comparisons between VCRs with similar features showed no significant differences in performance. In fact, most of the differences could only be seen with sensitive instruments, and likely would never show up on most consumer grade television sets. [5] In particular, the qualitative differences between the two formats were less than the differences between any two samples from the same manufacturer. [8]
Cheap Tricks
Possibly because of Beta's unpopularity, Beta VCRs were much cheaper than similar VHS VCRs by the end of 1985. A Beta HiFi VCR could sell for half the price of a VHS Hi-Fi VCR in 1984 [9], and by the end of 1985 Betas were selling for under $300. [10]
The Fat Lady Sings
In 1987, Rolling Stone announced that "The battle is over." [11] On Jauary 10, 1988 Sony admitted to plans for a VHS line of VCRs. VHS players commanded 95% of the VCR market. [12]
In May 1988, Video magazine came out with an article entitled "Beta Survival Guide." [14] And in September Sony's first VHS recorders came off its assembly lines. [15] A year later, the Betamax share of the consumer VCR market had dropped to less than 1%. [16]
Today the format is still around. In 1994, Video magazine published another survival guide, explaining that the scarcity of blank Beta tapes has consumers buying up prerecorded tapes at fire sale prices, to record over them. [17]
Counting up the Points
Sony did not commit the sins ascribed to them by most of the pundits explaining the demise of Betamax.
In its January 25 issue, Time explained that "While at first Sony kept its Beta technology mostly to itself, JVC, the Japanese inventor of VHS, shared its secret with a raft of other firms." [13] This is blatantly untrue. While Sony was decidedly behind in the licensing of its technology, it tried from the very beginning to sign on other manufacturers to the Beta standard.
2) Betamax was not too expensive.
Consumers buying a new VCR saw only minor pricing differences between the two formats. Those looking for the latest technology could apparently find Betamax machines for much less than comparable VHS machines. (Interestingly, one article [8] that makes this statement actually compares two machines where the VHS version is $600 dollars cheaper than the Betamax machine. Possibly the technophile streak that appears to be the curse of many Betamax afficionadoes influences buying decisions much more than price.)
3) There was no shortage of prerecorded Beta tapes
This at least was true initially. Only once the Betamax share had declined well below the VHS share, did prerecorded tape manufacturers try to decrease their inventories.
4) The Universal and Disney's suit against Sony had no determinable effect on Sony's standing in the VCR market. However, this issue is less than clearcut.
Even Sony today agrees that the difference in recording length was the difference that layed Beta low. [17] The other factor appears to have been the one factor for which no company can control: pure luck.
References
[1] "The Format War," Video Magazine, April 1988, pp50-54+
[2] "Whatever Happened to Betamax?", Consumers' Research, May 1989, p 28
[3] "The Betamax Blues", New York, September 15, 1980, p 43
[4] "Beta/VHS What's the Difference", Video Today, January 1981, p A8
[5] "VHS Meets Beta", Popular Electronics, August 1981, p 43
[6] "Even Sony Can't Avoid the Price War in VCRs", Business Week, September 6, 1982, p 33-34
[7] "VHS Hi-Fi: JVC Answers Back", High Fidelity, September 1983, p 65
[8] Stereo Review, April 1984, p 66
[9] "Tape Format Face-Off", High Fidelity, September 1985, p 45
[10] "To the Beta End", Forbes, Dec 16, 1985, p 178
[11] "Format Wars", Rolling Stone, Ja 15, 1987, p 43
[12] "Sony Isn't Mourning the 'Death' of Betamax", Business Week, Ja 25, 1988, p 37
[13] "Goodbye Beta", Time, Ja 25 1988, p 52
[14] "Beta Survival Guide", Video, May 88, pp 45-48
[15] "Video News", Radio Electronics, Sep 88, p 6
[16] "Whatever Happened to Betamax", Consumers' Research, May 89, p 28
[17] "Desperately Seeking Beta", Video, Feb 1994, p 42-44+
REPEAT!!!!
This is a duplicate story. Again. Am I supposed to comment on this twice?
At least, that's what they say in the FAQ. I suggest the people that whine about dupes read it. Heck, if it's a dupe story, don't read it. You've already read it. Go to next story. Big whooping deal.
It's not like all the slashdot stories reside in databases on OUR systems. It's their database. If they want to have redundant data in it (a.k.a. dupe stories), let them.
BETA is supperior to VHS, basing quality as proliferation of the general market is asinine.
Is dejá-vu.org taken? :)
And why is the html validator on w3.org blocked?
J.
Do we really need another debate about VHS vs Beta? Beta is dead, VHS won, and will itself be replaced by DVD-R in a few years. Enough already!
...that there's all these duplicate comments complaining about how the story is a duplicate story...
those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.
OK I realize this is a duped post, but I never got a chance to read it before, I only realized it was duped when I read the comments! o_O Anyway, VHS won because "the whole product" did what people wanted at a price they were willing to pay. And when people use the VHS v Beta analogy, they are not indicating a market failure but their own ignorance. People's ignorance is the most common reason new products don't succeed, yeah, obvious, we know. But who's to say this product didn't suck? Isn't this guy being a little arrogant to say people as a whole are just plain ignorant? Ok so we are. I'm ignorant. YOU reading my post, yeah you, you're ignorant too. We all are. But if we, the ignorant masses accepted all the new and radical ideas introduced to us over the last few decades, why would this be any different? I say, because it wasn't a good product. And I'd venture that's what everyone else who didn't like it thought too. Just my 2 cents (and a paper clip)
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
We already new that if you ignored Linux on PPC's obvious superiorities a wintel box will sell better.
We already new that if you ignored Linux on PPC's obvious superiorities a wintel box will sell better.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
and yet, here you are.
The rule is quite simple. You need to "trick" a /. editor to repost a recent /. story. The shorter the interval between original and the repost, the higher your score. Also you got bonus points if it is the same editor and/or under the same headline.
And if you have posted in the original story you can try to repost your comments to see if you get the same score or even the same modifier!
Let the game begin.
Codeala - Just another mindless drone
... but it did run on Fark...
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
The horse is dead!
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. --Edmund Burke
That's like saying "Bose is better than Halcro because more people buy Bose"!
Why Slashdot is better than Kuro5hin.
/because/ it is an amzingly popular weblog.
Before you mod me down as a troll, look at the idea-
Kuro5hin has many of the features people consistantly ask for (voting for stories)
Kuro5hin isn't owned by a large, closed source software-company.
Kuro5hin has more intellegant discussion, and fewer duplicated stories
But Slashdot has more users. Slashdot is an amazingly popular weblog,
Think about that. The main reason Slashdot is popular is because of it's base of users. Because of the comments. And higher-installed base makes it more attractive to many people.
That is exactly the argument made in this article.
Just some thoughts.
Colin
Colin Davis
Now thats an article we could use o n/. .
i've been thinking of ways of preventing duplicate stories... and the most effective method that i've thought of would be an algorithm that compared new stories with older stories and searched for identical links. if they were found, it could notify the editor
i can't imagine it would be that difficult to implement, but i'm not actually familiar with slashcode story management.
if searching through all past stories is too intensive, a simple script could be written that would be run every time a story is posted. it would parse out each linked address in the post and add it to a database. searching an indexed database consisting of addresses every time a story is posted would be trivial...
According to the premise of the article, in a percieved sense, VHS was better than Beta. Yeah so what? It doesn't stop Beta being a better format in a very real sense. Neither does it stop a Lintel platform being better in a real sense than Wintel
cut it out with the repeats!!!!
5i9|\|3d, 5|\|ip3ri|\|di59ui53
This article is crap. betamax had more lines of resolution, so technologically, it was superior. What actually happened was an undercutting market share move. Also, this was coupled with a law suit that allowed for copying of tv programs in the home which was the big fear. VHS was strategically positioned thorugh undercutting for using the logo and for more adoption by lower priced manufacturers. it is correct that people dont care about the nit picky technology if what they want to do just works. of course, this is why you should buy a mac. A superior interface that just works. All of that MHZ stuff doesn't matter. The technology just works.
I have an old, Sanyo top-loader Beta that I bought with money from my first job in 1985 and it's still running. The picture quality on it is better than the five four-head, gee-whiz VHS turds that have died on me within a couple of years of ownership. VHS won the format battle because of one thing...PORN! You could squeeze 7 hours of porn on a VHS tape, but only 4 on a beta. Microsoft proved it...your stuff can be better and still fail commercially.
--
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
comments commenting on the duplication of comments?
Your post alone has served to convince me that we not only need a +1 troll rating, but might well need a +1 redundant as well.
KFG
12/M/PA ;-)
So that's why Circuit City recently stopped stocking VHS.
I'll be looking into my local outlet every few days, I can tell you that much...
Vindication at last!!!
Is there one of those little copy-protect tabs on /.? If so, someone please pry that sucker off so we can avoid future copies.
You're the 10,000th person to suggest that!
To claim your prize, set your head on fire and jump out a window!
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
Unfortunately, it's not 1998 anymore, and slashdot is an albatross around VA Linux^wResearch^wSoftware's neck. Online advertising doesn't pay, especially when 75% of readers use an ad blocker or ad blocking browser.
CmdrTaco would have you belive that people only read slashdot for the front page links, not the reader comments. He better hope not -- if that were the case, kerneltrap + osnews + wired + the register would replace this dump.
I do have suggestions for "premium access" accounts (ie - a paid subscription model) that people might use, as well as some ideas in general to improve slashdot
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Ok, so the whole product idea makes a little sense, but the writer was completely wrong when he used the windows example. At this point Windows isn't accepted because of the whole product model anymore, but rather because people don't know they have a choice. In terms of cost effectiveness for the price of Windows XP with Office I could buy another computer. Windows isn't beating anyone, they're dupping everyone.
My Blog
Hey guys, calm down, this is the Nvidia release of this story, couple days late, with a 5% faster read time!
01:36AM up 426 days, 2:46, 1 user, load average: 0.14, 0.11, 0.05
The value of a product is not defined by its creators. It is defined by its market. Meaning its users and customers.
Linux is doomed to be a niche player until this fact is more widely accepted. It doesn't matter what geeks think about the product if the end user is not satisfied, overjoyed even.
As it is today, woe to any newbie who wants to jump on the linux bandwagon; all they get is name calling and static when they have real problems. The overall experience can be very unpleasant.
I know you are smarter than me and that is why I am asking you to be more clear. When the post says 'dupe' it makes me think that you have been duped as in 'fake.' I guess I know what you mean, maybe.
or at least that is what i think the title of the movie was with bill murray....he keeps reliving the same days, we keep rereading the same story...but its a little bit different each time
comeon man....who give a shit about anything betamax or vhs? give it a break already.
I forgot to reply the first time this article was posted, so here goes...
Schofield seems to think that the incredibly obvious and oft-repeated arguments he presents have some relevance in evaluating the beliefs of people who think Beta was superior to VHS. He doesn't present a survey of the beliefs of these people, so I'll have to go with my own experiences, which in every instance contradict Schofield's view.
Schofield's insight mostly boils down to the obvious fact that the product that won was the one that on the whole was preferable to consumers. No Beta advocate could possibly dispute that. Nonetheless, there is actual substance to the claim that Beta was superior to VHS. People who preferred Beta did so on the basis of particular attributes that were important to them, and that were demonstrably superior in Beta. "Technical superiority" is a fair characterization of these attributes, and is clearly the point people are making when they say or write that Beta was better than VHS.
Schofield's condescending and infantile tone aside, his argument has no demonstrable substance. For whatever reason, he chooses not to understand the trivial and obviously factual point made by people who point out that Beta was (at least in many important respects) technically superior to VHS. Does he really think that Betamax advocates think Beta offered a better "whole product" than VHS? That seems unlikely. My guess is that he wanted to write that pointing out Beta's technical superiority is beside the point. But it makes better headlines to say something is a myth than to say it's beside the point, especially since not everyone cares what Jack Schofield thinks the point is. The fact that he has to create a straw man in order to do so seems not to worry him.
His argument is akin to pointing out that someone who says Shawn Bradley is a very tall center is missing the point. Obviously, commenting on Shawn Bradley's height is not the best way of assessing his talents as a center. But when I say he's tall, I mean he's tall. If I wanted to comment on his value as a center, I'd do that. If Schofield wants to argue that someone has a "failure to understand how technology markets work," then he should find a claim about technology markets. The claim that Beta was technically superior to VHS is not one.
Just to be clear, I was never a Beta advocate. I did have both kinds of machines when I was younger, and on the whole I would have been happier had Beta won, but my comments are not motivated by any history of rabid advocacy. On the whole, I couldn't care less than I do about VCR tape formats. But I do get a little upset now and then when ignorant people abuse their soapboxes to mock folks with more reasonable and well supported views.
Are people now submitting dupes on purpose to try and trip up the editors? Will there be bets on how long until the next dupe? And finally, how can I get in on it?
When I see dups like this, I often wonder what gets thrown out in favor of repeating the same exact stuff? Instead of meta-moderating comments, is there anyway to get to the raw Slashdot submissions? Maybe even meta-moderate the raw submissions?
r y/0,1 2449,881780,00.html
r y/0,1 2449,881780,00.html
What really has me stumped, is while Slashdot acknowledges the repeation behavior of Spam and the ability to use gzip to filter spam, they can't come up with anything to locate how much Slashdot repeats.
Some of the excuses is that link checking won't work since repeats are due to similar stories at complettely different URLs such as CNET and Wired both reporting on the same new advancement in electronics. Ok, that seems like a worthy excuse to explore:
On Sunday, January 26th, michael posted a linke to:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/comment/sto
On Tuesday, January 28th, timothy posted a link to:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/comment/sto
Hmmm... looks like link checking would have caught this. But lets say the links where different. How about the Slashdot search engine. If we look for the title "Why VHS Was Better Than Betamax" which was posted by Timothy and "order by score" then "Why VHS Was Better" from Jan 26th gets a score of 1.0 and is listed immediately after Timothy's new post. The next score drops down to 0.4.
So, even if link checking would have missed this duplicate, the Slashdot search engine scoring might be of assistance to an "editor."
But I really think this shows that Slashcode should allow the readers to assist in the editorial process. Users that login should be able to get ten random submissions of which they can do the following:
- Recommend to be rejected for containing a broken URL
- Recommend to be reject because wording of scoop does not make sense
- Recommend to be reject because the article is clearly an advertizement
- Recommend to be reject because the article is a duplicate
- Suggest alternative Subject wording
- Suggest alternative Topic or Section area
- Rank level of how interesting the article is
/. posts MAYBE 10 new stories a day, MAYBE
I can remember wether I have seen the story for at least a week.
I do remember when there was a story posted and BARELY 6-8 hours later it was reposted...
What we do need is for the editors to at least check the front page, and the yesterdays edition before they even post. A script will only allow them to get EVEN LAZIER than they are already.
moo.
This is a dupe of a comment from a couple days ago:
Here's an idea I just thinked:
One of the perks of having the highest karma ratings on Slashdot could be that the top 50 users could see a story for the first 5 minutes before comments could be taken on that story. So that we can eliminate these pesky dupes once and for all, those users could be given a "this looks like a dupe" button. If the button is pressed by one of the chosen few, then the story could return to the poster for review and possibly cancellation, saving both time and embarrassment.
I like my idea, however I cannot foresee what the negative astroturfing aspects of this feature might wind up being.
I definitely wrote this before coffee, so all standard disclaimers apply.
Oliver Wendel Jones stated that the test of the truth of an idea is its power to get accepted in the marketplace of ideas. While there is some validity to this notion, it lacks familiarity with a physical or logical discipline. Our society is blighted with a tendancy to ascribe anthropomorphic victory to an idea which has achieved greater acceptance. This blight is in part the reason we fall victim to other basic flaws in logical thinking which lead to such phenomenon as bigotry. If one loses the backwards need to declare victory of some kind, one can see that the popularity of an idea is no measure of its accuracy or validity. After all, if enough people think that individuals of african descent are less intelligent than those of european descent, does this make the idea true? Certainly it does not. But, at one time, it was widely accepted. If an idea becomes popular enough, it becomes deemed 'right' by those who have no intellectual ambition to see for themselves what they want to believe.
The intelligent thing to do is simply to point out that VHS was more popular than betamax. The mistake is to confuse popularity with quality. They are actually two different things.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
The best part of slashdot is that it is possible to get first post in the same story..TWICE
And I just sold my VHS to buy a DVD player! :)
What this article really explains is why we are so wrong about the Prisoner's Dilemna. You know, the police interrogator offers to co-conspirators the chance to confess--if neither confesses they both get 5 years of jail, if one confesses he goes free while his associate gets 20 years, and if both confess they both get 10 years.
The Beta VCR, Linux, and Apple fans say a cooperative strategy of mutually refusing to confess is the best strategy that maximizes the cumulative outcome of everyone. But this article and most consumers evaluate the "whole product" of confession and incarceration, realizing that they are better off confessing no matter what their associate does, and goes out to buy Office XP.
The common wisdom, as I know it, is that Betamax was technologically superior, but VHS was in the right place at the right time, and ended up with the whole market. Considering just the item itself, Beta is better, but the whims of the market (the whole product, although what is important is only obvious in hindsight) are more important than the finer points of technology.
Of course, the wisdom imagines a semi-mythical time when neither technology was developed into a product; people don't wish that 1-hour tapes had won the market, they wish that Beta encoding had won, either by being marketted more effectively, or even simply by being used in VHS recorders. The real question is not why consumers buy technologically inferior but more suitable products, it's why more suitable products are made with inferior technology; the answer is that the wrong company owns the wrong technology.
Well, I must I have replied to something about Ethnocentrism in some long ago forgotten era, and mozilla now thinks all subject lines should be ethnocentrism. From now on I do my web browsing with power point like everyone else.
it's strange seeing VHS referred to in the past-tense. I still have tons of VHS tapes and a working VCR!
A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with. - Tennessee Williams
... the old "one million morons can't be wrong" approach to marketing.
:o(
Only a real idiot would believe such rubbish.
All you trolls out there, with various free-times and scripts, how about you guys start up some scripts which pick random dupes and submit them? I can see that this problem has gotten out of hand, but the editors obviously dont, so let us join together and troll their fucking asses.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
The quality of betamax is so much better... I remember watching tape after tape of betamax dubs of Japanese shows at my friend's house... good times :D
I've been using a Hi-8 for recording for the past six years now. Works great, and I can store about eight of them in the space of one VHS tape!
Groundhog Day?
Ever think you were in it?
Ever think the slashdot moderators were in it?
my ass really hurts. I suck.
cuz id very easy to make do same thing over an ova again.
cuz id very easy to make do same thing over an ova again.
cuz id very easy to make do same thing over an ova again.
--Enter The Sig--
--Idiots, Every single one of YOU, A flaming mass of conglomerated morons, hey wait a second, isnt that how RAID works?
I have to say that the author of this article doesn't understand why people talk about the way things ought to be. As in the case of the standard x86 system. He clames that PCs are better because more people use them therefor there is a greater support and software base... Duh! It doesn't change the fact that there is better technology out there and that the masses don't always make the best descisions. Simply, by his arguements the consumer chooses the better "whole product" and through that choice makes it the better "whole product". So what's the point of the article? I don't think the author could even give you a valid arguement for the existance of the article.
How about the rumor that VHS beat Betamax, because it was willing to let the porn industry use its format, whereas Betamax was resistent?
Here is a crash course tutorial on how not to repeat stories on Slashdot. This tutorial comes FREE(as in beer) of cost !
1. After you have decided on the story, point your URL to http://slashdot.org.
2. Scroll down to the bottom of the page you see.
3. Locate the text box on the left. Make sure that there is a button titled "Search" on to it's right.
4. Choose some keywords from the article, and type them out in the text box. If you need a tutorial on how to select keywords, quit this job.
5. Now click the search button and wait for the results. Among the results, see if any articles have been posted before.
Yes, it's that simple ! Example query listing is here
getSexySig();
Sorry, I seem to be off-topic by posting about the actual article rather than about dupes, but here I go. (I missed the Sunday article due to travel so wouldn't have seen this but for the duplication.)
The Guardian article had this paragraph about DAT:
"Let's take a simple example: digital audio tape (Dat). Get someone to compare Dat with a humble C90 compact cassette and they will find Dat to be technologically superior, especially for recording music. However, if you consider "the whole product", Dat is vastly inferior for most people most of the time. This is why people still buy millions of cassettes, while Dat has virtually disappeared from consumer use."
I don't think Schofield understands the DAT failure at all. He argues that it failed because it was inferior to C90s on a "whole product" basis. That's just bunk. In no way was it inferior to analog tape as a "whole product", except maybe the Serial Copy Management Scheme (if I remember the name). It failed because it was inferior to *Compact Disc* as a "whole product". There was no motivation to start collecting new releases in yet another digital format, and I think the phenomenon of taping one's music for archival purposes really declined after CDs became popular. So the only application was for creating mix tapes, or for recording live performances. And I think that cut way down on the demand for any new tape-based medium.
Now we've got MP3 or Ogg and the random access they provide, which of course is better (from a "whole product" stance) than any tape-based medium can be.
the format war shall never die, its children scarred by the myriad media of data retention and the chaos that unraveled continuously.
nay, the light shall not come Ð a future of agreeance is shrouded like the chunky thighs of an overweight nun.
when, peace, when? when shall both be valid choices and the need for absolue superiority fade away into a tepid pool of lukewarm gellato?
1) Sony invented Betamax, and JVC invented VHS. Sony didn't want to share, so they could make more money, and either kept the technology to itself or licensed it for hideous sums of money. JVC, in comparison, pretty much gave VHS away. When companies other than Sony or JVC had to decide which format to produce VCRs in, it was much cheaper for them to go the JVC route, so they did so. Suddenly Sony was by themselves against the entire rest of the industry. (They did something similar with the MiniDisc, which is dead for pretty much the same reasons.)
2) Porn. I'm serious. Sony didn't want to sell Betamax tape copiers to companies that would produce pornographic material. (At least, not without charging a frigging fortune for it.) On the other hand, VHS being a rather open standard, they could find a company willing to work with them since there were plenty to choose from. VHS became the standard for porn, and, well, you can guess which type of tape player became the choice for millions of single males in the world.
And that's why VHS lived and Beta died. It was Sony shooting themselves. Kind of the way they're doing again with the whole internal battle between their music and movie divisions and their tech divisions; one wants to make cool tech that plays back movies and videos, and the other screams piracy and tries to lock it down so hard that nobody wants to buy the stuff. D'oh.
A random footnote: This is one of the examples of how more openness in hardware leads to economic victory. I'm sure a bunch of slashbots should love to know that the theory can work.
Duuuuuuuuuuuuupe!
It doesn't matter that this was posted two days ago, and the articles are similar in functionality, this article is better as far as the whole product aspect.
While he argues that in fact VHS was the superior "whole product", I think you could make a parallel, and to me more articulate argument that in fact VHS was technically superior in the category that consumers cared most about: the length of the tape. Now, if the video quality had been really bad (i.e. unwatchable), then it wouldn't have mattered if they were 12 hour tapes. So, VHS was technically adequate in some respects, but actually superior in the most important category. I realize that you could argue that "whole product" covers everything I just said, but it seems to be a vague term.
Well, I must I have replied to something about Ethnocentrism in some long ago forgotten era, and mozilla now thinks all subject lines should be ethnocentrism. From now on I do my web browsing with power point like everyone else. Well, I must I have replied to something about Ethnocentrism in some long ago forgotten era, and mozilla now thinks all subject lines should be ethnocentrism. From now on I do my web browsing with power point like everyone else.Well, I must I have replied to something about Ethnocentrism in some long ago forgotten era, and mozilla now thinks all subject lines should be ethnocentrism. From now on I do my web browsing with power point like everyone else.Well, I must I have replied to something about Ethnocentrism in some long ago forgotten era, and mozilla now thinks all subject lines should be ethnocentrism. From now on I do my web browsing with power point like everyone else.Well, I must I have replied to something about Ethnocentrism in some long ago forgotten era, and mozilla now thinks all subject lines should be ethnocentrism. From now on I do my web browsing with power point like everyone else.Well, I must I have replied to something about Ethnocentrism in some long ago forgotten era, and mozilla now thinks all subject lines should be ethnocentrism. From now on I do my web browsing with power point like everyone else.Well, I must I have replied to something about Ethnocentrism in some long ago forgotten era, and mozilla now thinks all subject lines should be ethnocentrism. From now on I do my web browsing with power point like everyone else.Well, I must I have replied to something about Ethnocentrism in some long ago forgotten era, and mozilla now thinks all subject lines should be ethnocentrism. From now on I do my web browsing with power point like everyone else.Well, I must I have replied to something about Ethnocentrism in some long ago forgotten era, and mozilla now thinks all subject lines should be ethnocentrism. From now on I do my web browsing with power point like everyone else.
This post is rated (Score: 90, Informative, Interesting, Insightful, Funny, REDUNDANT)
k )
;-)
...the marketplace should never be open to formats which are almost direct replacements for previous formats.
...and the BBS versus MiniTEL.
k )
:)
survival of the fittest (Score:5, Insightful)
by Interfacer (560564) Alter Relationship on 2003.01.26 13:16 (#5161151)
a lot of people are confused about this phrase, thinking of 'fit' as being technical superior.
in fact the term fit does have nothing to do with that, but should be interpreted as 'fitted for a certain purpose'
for example one of the reasons that windows version whatever is so popular with computer iliterate persons is that it takes you by the hand to do a lot of things, which can be a pain for power users, but not for newbies. in that sense windows is most 'fitted' for that situation, just as linux is for power users, server systems, or as BSD on powerful stable systems with 1000's of connections at a time.
other examples are software programming where C++ can be the best solution for developing algorithms, and VB for simple DB connected user interfaces.
the 'fittest' solution survives in the place where it is used at its best. C is not 'better' than VB. it is fit for other purposes than VB.
you can only talk about 'better' when two things are designed for the exact same purpose.
Interfacer.
[ Reply to This ]
* 6 replies beneath your current threshold.
The only convincing bit was... (Score:5, Insightful)
by Anonymous Coward on 2003.01.26 13:20 (#5161164)
When they were released, betamax had only 1 hour tapes.. VHS had two hour tapes...
You could record a film onto VHS... which you couldn't do with beta unless you were sitting in front of it to change the tapes halfway through.
[ Reply to This ]
* 6 replies beneath your current threshold.
This will continue (Score:5, Interesting)
by indigogorge.net (535856) Alter Relationship on 2003.01.26 13:24 (#5161172)
As long as some companies try to make everyone buy proprietary products, this will happen. VHS was not better than BetaMax. Sony simply did not want to share. Hence, VHS was more widely accepted because everyone could buy a VHS player, and not a very pricy BetaMax player. If you looked at minidisk 12 years ago, when CDs where starting to come out, they offered the same capacity, and so many more features. But in the End, it was cheaper for people to buy CDs, instead of buying proprietary expensive Sony only players and products. Same thing with sony memorystick. Make it an open source product, and just collect license fees, or what have you. Then everyone will use it if it is a good thing. I'm sure there are a lot more companies like this, but I just picked on Sony because it is their original product.
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A lesson the Linux worlds needs to learn (Score:5, Insightful)
by rufusdufus (450462) Alter Relationship on 2003.01.26 13:25 (#5161173)
The value of a product is not defined by its creators. It is defined by its market. Meaning its users and customers.
Linux is doomed to be a niche player until this fact is more widely accepted. It doesn't matter what geeks think about the product if the end user is not satisfied, overjoyed even.
As it is today, woe to any newbie who wants to jump on the linux bandwagon; all they get is name calling and static when they have real problems. The overall experience can be very unpleasant.
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Re:A lesson the Linux worlds needs to learn (Score:5, Insightful)
by reallocate (142797) Alter Relationship on 2003.01.26 13:48 (#5161223)
True, true. I'd add that most geeks also seem to expect computer users to progress from a newbie state (Windows) to a "power user" state" Linux. In other words, they expect the customer to change rather than the product.
What they seem to fail to understand is that many, if not most computer users, aren't that interested in computers, no more than they have an abiding interest in how television works. Its "what" it enables them to do, not how it does it, that counts.
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He's right... He's wrong... (Score:5, Interesting)
by Jayson (2343) Alter Relationship on 2003.01.26 13:27 (#5161179)
(http://www.xcf.berkeley.edu/~nordwic
He says that geeks don't understand about the total package and that technical ability isn't the only thing. He's right in that is what geeks say. However, geeks do realize this, but they just don't know it.
From an example taken from The Other Site [kuro5hin.org] in the last day: programming languages. People will willingly use broken languages, not as superior, because they interface to more things, can be applied to more general purpose situations (even when they shouldn't be), or have bigger libraries. You only need to look to Perl and C.
Perl is an attrocious language judging on purely technical merits, however CPAN and all the sugar it has are what give people reason to use it. You will often hear the C or Perl apologist say, "it does what I need good enough" or "I get work done in it." This is almost the same decision calculous that the author is expousing: people chose VHS because it did what they needed (recording a two hour movie unattended) and it did it well enough (they couldn't tell the difference in image quality).
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Its not just the technical (Score:5, Interesting)
by locarecords.com (601843) Alter Relationship on 2003.01.26 13:41 (#5161208)
(http://www.locarecords.com/ | Last Journal: 2002.08.26 13:35)
I think this is an important point when creating technical projects - it is not just the technical specifications that sell a product (well for non-slashdot readers anyway
I don't know if anyone has come across the writer Bruno Latour but he argues convincingly that we need a more complex understanding of the way technology projects are started, run and completed in order to understand why certain technical decisions are made. Afterall there can be cost constraints, efficiency constraints, material constraints, management constraints, organisational constraints (ie we don't do it like that here) and so on and on.
The phrase heterogeneous engineering is a great term that refers to the way technical people have to engineer not just, say, the software, but also the managers, other people, organisational lethagy and so on just to get the thing out of the drawing room (let alone the door).
I remember working for a very prestigious and large media company who could not see the value of the Internet whatso ever. No matter how much I banged on about it. In the end I left as it was clear the managers and company were still living in the land of VAX/VMS... Shit they were *still* worrying about X25!
But it is interesting how we as engineers have to have the social skills as well as technical skills in order to move a project forward... and that can be much harder than the technical!
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Tomorrow on Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
by SlashdotLemming (640272) Alter Relationship on 2003.01.26 13:50 (#5161225)
Why Iron was better than Bronze
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Random VHS fact! (Score:5, Informative)
by iamdrscience (541136) Alter Relationship on 2003.01.26 14:00 (#5161239)
(http://itsbeenconfirmed.com/)
Ever wonder what VHS stands for?
It stands for Vertical Helix Scan
now you know and knowing is half the battle...
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Acronyms Change With Time! (Score:5, Interesting)
by CharlieO (572028) Alter Relationship on 2003.01.27 2:09 (#5164509)
There is a remarkable phenmenom with technical acronyms.
Thier meaning shifts over time. Mainly this is because the technology they describe becomes successful and the meaning of the orginal expansion is no longer valid. However the acronym is firmly rooted almost like a brand name, so usually the expansion is changed.
For instance VHS did originally expand to Vertical Helical Scan - which is a description of the way that the enigineering team solved how keep the tape speed over the head high without having to have the tape itself spooling at hig speed and therefor needing a huge amount of it.
Later as it became popular and mass market the expansion changed to Video Home System as this was more understandable for the consumer.
Video Home System (a less daunting rendering of the original acronym, which stood for Vertical Helical Scan)
Reference : Baird to MPEG A History Of Video [transdiffusion.org]
Look at the GSM [gsmworld.com] mobile phone standard. Orignially this stood for Group Spécial Mobile [handytel.com] - a special interest of the CEPT set up to develop one digital standard, based on the existing ISDN standard,for mobile phones in Europe to replace the mess of competing analogue ones.
Nowadays, given the massive success of the standard the expansion is Global System for Mobile communications [handytel.com].
DECT [www.dect.ch] originally stood for Digital European Cordless Terminal [handytel.com]. For the non Europeans its a standard for short range digital handset to base station communication for cordless phones. Being a standard you can now buy extra handsets from whoever you want, and things like wireless modems. As its success took off and it began to be used outside of Europe then the expansion changed to Digital Enhanced Cordless Terminal [handytel.com]
As mentioned elsewher in this thread DVD originally stood for Digital Video Disc but as it became apparent that a high capacity replacement for CD could have many uses it was renamed to Digital Versatile Disc with the convention that the specific use is tagged afterwards, hence DVD-Video, DVD-RAM, DVD-ROM, DVD-Audio The moral of the story is be careful what you state an acronym stands for - a whole load of them in daily use have stood for a number of things in thier history!!
Oh, and yes I do currently work in the telecoms side of it, how did you guess??
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V2000 (Score:5, Interesting)
by grundie (220908) Alter Relationship on 2003.01.26 14:40 (#5161325)
To hell with Betamax and VHS. Philips V2000 format was better than the both of them. It had double sided tapes, supeior picture quality, embedded timecode and really long tapes. It was years ahead of both Betamax and VHS. I'm surprised the author of the article didn't llok in to V2000 as it was quite popular in Britain for a while, before losing the marketing battle.
As to the comparisons between VHS and Beta, I think the author makes a big blunder about VHS's success. I recall a TV interview with Alan Sugar, the founder of Amstrad which is a UK stack em high, sell em cheap electronics manufacturer. In the interview he said that his decision to make VHS machines in the early 80's was down to the fact that JVC offered him much more attractive licensing terms to use VHS as opposed to Sony who wanted twice as much for the Betamax system. Although market forces may have had an effect, surely VHS's success was more to do with the bigger profit margins it made for the manufacturers? Thus causing VHS to be promoted more at the expense of Betamax.
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So using this theory... (Score:5, Insightful)
by Delusion- (153011) Alter Relationship on 2003.01.26 15:13 (#5161404)
In 1973, when the Compact Disc was introduced, the "infrastructure of capabilities, services, and support" for analog audio cassettes - prerecorded and otherwise - was vastly superior to that of the audio cassette. The CD prevailed despite the fact that there was no ability to record - analog cassette recorders are now most often encountered as unused legacy devices on multi-function audio hardware.
This "whole product" theory is an unenlightening justification for the emerging popularity of specific standards - it's the best product because it's the one most people buy? While there's truth to this, this fact is often less interesting than examining WHY this is the case.
If the technical standards of Betamax were superior to VHS - and they were - it's more useful to examine why these did not produce the dominant product than it is just to hand-wave the issue by saying that the best product is that which everyone else ended up buying. Any discussion of VHS versus BetaMax that doesn't discuss the fact that Sony wouldn't license its format to adult video studios misses another important aspect of why formats emerge and gain dominance over existing formats - the 'killer ap'.
The fact that he dismisses DAT audio with his "whole product" argument does not strengthen it in the least. The DAT cassette was a product the market was eager and ready for, and the more passive segment of the consumer base would have eventually caught up with the geeks, audiophiles, and techs. The RIAA crippled the format before it reached the consumer by disabling digital-to-digital copying, which given the dominance of the audio cassette DESPITE noted technical deficiencies (fragility, sound quality on normal-bias cassettes, less convenience for liner notes than vinyl), would have been an easy sell to a consumer base used to direct copying. Score one for the RIAA.
Enter MP3s. I've argued that the MP3 format is the just revenge of the marketplace against the deliberate crippling of DAT audio by the RIAA. The MP3 format became popular for technical reasons and became ubiquitous because the "whole product" was exactly what the marketplace had wanted and needed ever since the pre-recorded music industry moved to a read-only CD format - a high fidelity means of audio dubbing free from the limitations and physical fragility of analog cassettes. Had the RIAA had computer audio formats on its radar before it became a consumer reality, have no doubt that it, too, would have been a great idea that never made it to the broader marketplace.
The argument isn't, and never has been that BetaMax was the "better" format or that it was more suitable for the marketplace - the argument is that, based on wholly technical anaysis, it delivered a better performance than VHS. The VHS standard won out because RCA didn't keep their product a proprietary standard subject to its licensing regieme, because of porn as the 'killer ap' among early VHS adopters, because it was a cheaper product to adopt for end-users as well as studios (related to the license issue), and because as more manufacturers developed for what was effectively an open standard, they developed features to get their products noticed which in many cases became standards - multiple recording speeds, for instance. There's no reason why, if the BetaMax standard were open, a savvy competetor in the market could have developed multiple recording speeds. Sony felt it had a say in this matter, RCA didn't.
While the "whole product" isn't a completely invalid method of analyzing competing formats, it is as narrow a look at a larger issue as solely focusing on the technical specs, and is particularly poorly-suited toward determining why a particular format bucks the trend of the status quo and gains market dominance.
If "whole product" were the whole story, we'd probably have never gotten to VHS or BetaMax, and Laser Disc and DVD would have been relegated to a curious historical diversion like the Ford Edsel, 3D cinema, or - more to the point - the DIVX DVD format...
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Not at all... (Score:5, Insightful)
by Jayson (2343) Alter Relationship on 2003.01.26 13:20 (#5161163)
(http://www.xcf.berkeley.edu/~nordwic
He argues that Betamax was actually more popular when it began, and they had a "defacto monopoly from tape incompatabilities." The author says that the reason Betamax lost the market was that it didn't do what the consumer wanted, to be able to record an entire movie unattended due to their one hour tape versus the VHS two hour tape. He has some other arguments, such as the Betamax was originally higher priced (and was cheaper, but only after losing market too much market share to matter).
His point wasn't that you can look at a single factor (e.g., popularity), but you have to weight products more holistically.
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Re:Not at all... (Score:5, Insightful)
by orthogonal (588627) Alter Relationship on 2003.01.26 14:04 (#5161255)
The author says that the reason Betamax lost the market was that it didn't do what the consumer wanted, to be able to record an entire movie unattended due to their one hour tape versus the VHS two hour tape. He has some other arguments, such as the Betamax was originally higher priced....
Hmmm. Makes me think of MP3s versus CDs. I listen to all of my music on MP3, despite having a (Sony, ironically enough!) 50 CD "jukebox".
Why do I sacrifice quality by listening to MP3s rather than CDs?
o Convenience: I can easily set up arbitrarily long, arbitrarily ordered MP3 playlists, and without the time it takes for the "jukebox" to physically chnage CDs.
o Greater selection at cheaper prices. While I do not and will not download MP3s to which I don't have a license, I can and do subscribe to emusic.com. This gives me an excellent selection of medium quality (128 kbps) MP3s, far more than I could afford as CDs -- and far more than I'd be tempted to "try out", buying CDs I might later find out didn't justify a $10-$20 price tag.
o Portability: Carrying around a portable CD player generally resulted in my listening to a single CD, over and over, as carrying additional CDs was inconvenient (see reason #1, above) and resulted in losing numerous Cds. carrying around my Archos MP3 player gives my my entire music collection (currently about 14 GBs in MP3 format) in my pocket.
o Quality: I can't easily hear the difference in quality between a CD and an MP3, even when the MP3 is piped through the (now empty) "jukebox"'s speakers. To the extent that I can hear the difference, I prefer to indulge my eclectic musical taste in quantity rather than fewer selections in quality. Your mileage will undoutedly vary.
Quality's important, don't misunderstand me. But let me chicken out by closing with a few choice cliches: Often the best is the enemy of the good, and enough (quality, ironically, not quantity) is as good as a feast, and more than enough is as bad as a surfeit.
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Re:Not this crap again. (Score:5, Insightful)
by melonman (608440) Alter Relationship on 2003.01.26 13:29 (#5161187)
(http://www.cyberporte.co.uk/ | Last Journal: 2002.12.14 13:35)
but then simply states that, despite all of its advantages, VHS is still better because it's more popular.
There whas a bit more to his argument than that:
VHS offered a bigger choice of hardware at lower cost, the tapes were cheaper and more easily available, there were a lot more movies to rent, and so on.
Those sound like three quite important arguments to me, unless money is no object, you like buying hardware from a de facto monopoly, hunting for media is your idea of fun and you don't actually want to watch movies, just admire the spec.
A bit further on, he points out another specific flaw in Sony's market research:
Sony got one simple decision wrong. It chose to make smaller, neater tapes that lasted for an hour, whereas the VHS manufacturers used basically the same technology with a bulkier tape that lasted two hours.
Now I don't know a lot about the details, but would it have been that hard for Sony to provide essentially the same technology with a larger box and a longer tape? As the article continues:
Their spouses/children/grandparents and everybody else would quickly have told them the truth. "We're going out tonight and I want to record a movie. That Betamax tape is useless: it isn't long enough. Get rid of it."
And that's the basis problem with the general population who decide which products succeed by their purchasing decisions: they see technology as a means to an end, not as something to admire for its intrinsic cleverness.
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Re:Not this crap again. (Score:5, Insightful)
by melonman (608440) Alter Relationship on 2003.01.26 14:28 (#5161295)
(http://www.cyberporte.co.uk/ | Last Journal: 2002.12.14 13:35)
But none of those are technological reasons.
I would have thought that the storage capacity was quite an important technological criterion for a storage medium. If the technology is for home recording, and the tape it too short to record what a lot of people what to record, ie full-length films, isn't that a bit of a drawback? I have to say that I'd rather see all of a film at less than perfect quality than all but the last 20 minutes of a film at wonderful quality.
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Re:Not this crap again. (Score:5, Insightful)
by nehril (115874) Alter Relationship on 2003.01.26 13:39 (#5161201)
I think the image quality differences are a big deal only to a very small segment. The difference between VHS's "good" and BetaMax's "great" is lost on most people. good is good enough. people will opt for lossy "compression" for the sake of more content (witness the MP3 format's success.) consider that even with vhs most people will record at whatever level gives them the longest record time, sacrificing quality.
Ask the average tivo owner what quality level they select for their seinfeld reruns. VHS won because it gave people more of less, in a way. Just like McDonalds makes money hand over fist serving "food" that would make a french chef gag.
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Re:Not this crap again. (Score:5, Insightful)
by roybadami (515249) Alter Relationship on 2003.01.26 14:36 (#5161314)
And he has a pop at linux, but linux isn't meant to be a whole product
Well, not directly. He does say that Wintel is the best whole product, and for many classes of users it currently is. That doesn't mean we can't change that, though.
It's also interesting to apply the whole product anaysis to infrastructure services. For many services, Linux or UNIX of some flavour is clearly the best whole product. It comes with the infrastructure services you need as standard (mail servers, DNS servers, etc), and there's a huge support network of people out there using these UNIX tools in a native UNIX environment. Yes, you *can* run these tools under Wintel, but Linux/UNIX is the best whole product.
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2) Porn. I'm serious. Sony didn't want to sell Betamax tape copiers to companies that would produce pornographic material. (At least, not without charging a frigging fortune for it.) On the other hand, VHS being a rather open standard, they could find a company willing to work with them since there were plenty to choose from. VHS became the standard for porn, and, well, you can guess which type of tape player became the choice for millions of single males in the world.2) Porn. I'm serious. Sony didn't want to sell Betamax tape copiers to companies that would produce pornographic material. (At least, not without charging a frigging fortune for it.) On the other hand, VHS being a rather open standard, they could find a company willing to work with them since there were plenty to choose from. VHS became the standard for porn, and, well, you can guess which type of tape player became the choice for millions of single males in the world.2) Porn. I'm serious. Sony didn't want to sell Betamax tape copiers to companies that would produce pornographic material. (At least, not without charging a frigging fortune for it.) On the other hand, VHS being a rather open standard, they could find a company willing to work with them since there were plenty to choose from. VHS became the standard for porn, and, well, you can guess which type of tape player became the choice for millions of single males in the world.2) Porn. I'm serious. Sony didn't want to sell Betamax tape copiers to companies that would produce pornographic material. (At least, not without charging a frigging fortune for it.) On the other hand, VHS being a rather open standard, they could find a company willing to work with them since there were plenty to choose from. VHS became the standard for porn, and, well, you can guess which type of tape player became the choice for millions of single males in the world.2) Porn. I'm serious. Sony didn't want to sell Betamax tape copiers to companies that would produce pornographic material. (At least, not without charging a frigging fortune for it.) On the other hand, VHS being a rather open standard, they could find a company willing to work with them since there were plenty to choose from. VHS became the standard for porn, and, well, you can guess which type of tape player became the choice for millions of single males in the world.2) Porn. I'm serious. Sony didn't want to sell Betamax tape copiers to companies that would produce pornographic material. (At least, not without charging a frigging fortune for it.) On the other hand, VHS being a rather open standard, they could find a company willing to work with them since there were plenty to choose from. VHS became the standard for porn, and, well, you can guess which type of tape player became the choice for millions of single males in the world.2) Porn. I'm serious. Sony didn't want to sell Betamax tape copiers to companies that would produce pornographic material. (At least, not without charging a frigging fortune for it.) On the other hand, VHS being a rather open standard, they could find a company willing to work with them since there were plenty to choose from. VHS became the standard for porn, and, well, you can guess which type of tape player became the choice for millions of single males in the world.2) Porn. I'm serious. Sony didn't want to sell Betamax tape copiers to companies that would produce pornographic material. (At least, not without charging a frigging fortune for it.) On the other hand, VHS being a rather open standard, they could find a company willing to work with them since there were plenty to choose from. VHS became the standard for porn, and, well, you can guess which type of tape player became the choice for millions of single males in the world.2) Porn. I'm serious. Sony didn't want to sell Betamax tape copiers to companies that would produce pornographic material. (At least, not without charging a frigging fortune for it.) On the other hand, VHS being a rather open standard, they could find a company willing to work with them since there were plenty to choose from. VHS became the standard for porn, and, well, you can guess which type of tape player became the choice for millions of single males in the world.2) Porn. I'm serious. Sony didn't want to sell Betamax tape copiers to companies that would produce pornographic material. (At least, not without charging a frigging fortune for it.) On the other hand, VHS being a rather open standard, they could find a company willing to work with them since there were plenty to choose from. VHS became the standard for porn, and, well, you can guess which type of tape player became the choice for millions of single males in the world.2) Porn. I'm serious. Sony didn't want to sell Betamax tape copiers to companies that would produce pornographic material. (At least, not without charging a frigging fortune for it.) On the other hand, VHS being a rather open standard, they could find a company willing to work with them since there were plenty to choose from. VHS became the standard for porn, and, well, you can guess which type of tape player became the choice for millions of single males in the world.2) Porn. I'm serious. Sony didn't want to sell Betamax tape copiers to companies that would produce pornographic material. (At least, not without charging a frigging fortune for it.) On the other hand, VHS being a rather open standard, they could find a company willing to work with them since there were plenty to choose from. VHS became the standard for porn, and, well, you can guess which type of tape player became the choice for millions of single males in the world.2) Porn. I'm serious. Sony didn't want to sell Betamax tape copiers to companies that would produce pornographic material. (At least, not without charging a frigging fortune for it.) On the other hand, VHS being a rather open standard, they could find a company willing to work with them since there were plenty to choose from. VHS became the standard for porn, and, well, you can guess which type of tape player became the choice for millions of single males in the world.2) Porn. I'm serious. Sony didn't want to sell Betamax tape copiers to companies that would produce pornographic material. (At least, not without charging a frigging fortune for it.) On the other hand, VHS being a rather open standard, they could find a company willing to work with them since there were plenty to choose from. VHS became the standard for porn, and, well, you can guess which type of tape player became the choice for millions of single males in the world.2) Porn. I'm serious. Sony didn't want to sell Betamax tape copiers to companies that would produce pornographic material. (At least, not without charging a frigging fortune for it.) On the other hand, VHS being a rather open standard, they could find a company willing to work with them since there were plenty to choose from. VHS became the standard for porn, and, well, you can guess which type of tape player became the choice for millions of single males in the world.2) Porn. I'm serious. Sony didn't want to sell Betamax tape copiers to companies that would produce pornographic material. (At least, not without charging a frigging fortune for it.) On the other hand, VHS being a rather open standard, they could find a company willing to work with them since there were plenty to choose from. VHS became the standard for porn, and, well, you can guess which type of tape player became the choice for millions of single males in the world.2) Porn. I'm serious. Sony didn't want to sell Betamax tape copiers to companies that would produce pornographic material. (At least, not without charging a frigging fortune for it.) On the other hand, VHS being a rather open standard, they could find a company willing to work with them since there were plenty to choose from. VHS became the standard for porn, and, well, you can guess which type of tape player became the choice for millions of single males in the world.2) Porn. I'm serious. Sony didn't want to sell Betamax tape copiers to companies that would produce pornographic material. (At least, not without charging a frigging fortune for it.) On the other hand, VHS being a rather open standard, they could find a company willing to work with them since there were plenty to choose from. VHS became the standard for porn, and, well, you can guess which type of tape player became the choice for millions of single males in the world.
Why else would slashdot editors keep posting the SAME thing over and over...
come on guys, get up, walk around... then POST.
I don't think you got the point of that post you just replied to there pal.
- sigs are for wimps.
I don't think you got the point of that post you just replied to there pal.
- sigs are for wimps.
First off, Beta did have the better picture quality. VHS was crap. Done.
Second, a person is smart, people are dumb. Done.
Third, there wouldn't be a problem between VHS and Betamax or whatever format we are discussing today if companies didn't want not only a piece of the pie, but the whole thing and then some. It really comes down to what was advertised better. VHS was better marketed and pushed in the United States and people have to see what all of their little friends were using.
While I'm no clearly no genius, I think this author is just restating the obvious. Do you really think that I'm going to go buy a car that makes no pollution needs no maintanence and costs next to nothing to operate if I am not positive that I can keep its fuel supply (gas diesel, hydrogen, plutonium, etc) loaded today tommarow and into the future? The author is just another person who is happy the fell into the "majority" at the right time. He probably skipped Beta and bought VHS. He thinks Windows is IT and will follow the next fad to the end.
Also, quit your damn complaining about dupes. You all probably don't remember every single article that gets posted to Slashdot nor would you really be able to a day, week or month down the road. The poster appologized but its not like they are going to take it down. That would open up the door to things like "I don't like this comment, drop it." Once they have realized their mistake give it up and read on to the next tidbit.
I thought I went back in time and had an extra day to get this friggin project done. But noooo, it's a re-run. Dammit. Now I'll be up all night writing code.
These include the availability of cheap cassettes on every high street, cheap personal stereos, and the ability to use the same format for a wide range of applications (personal stereo, portable radio/cassette players, in the car, in your hi-fi stack).
So for the Linux Unix guys in user laymans terms this is why windows dominates:
These include the availability of cheap personal computers on every street corner, and the ability to use a vast category of applications made available by mulitple vendors that are standardized and built on windows.
a lot of people are confused about this phrase, thinking of 'fit' as being technical superior.
in fact the term fit does have nothing to do with that, but should be interpreted as 'fitted for a certain purpose'
for example one of the reasons that windows version whatever is so popular with computer iliterate persons is that it takes you by the hand to do a lot of things, which can be a pain for power users, but not for newbies. in that sense windows is most 'fitted' for that situation, just as linux is for power users, server systems, or as BSD on powerful stable systems with 1000's of connections at a time.
other examples are software programming where C++ can be the best solution for developing algorithms, and VB for simple DB connected user interfaces.
the 'fittest' solution survives in the place where it is used at its best. C is not 'better' than VB. it is fit for other purposes than VB.
you can only talk about 'better' when two things are designed for the exact same purpose.
Interfacer.
YES! it looks like i've warped back in time somehow. now i've got time to actualy do my homework and stop reading /. because i know all the articles
Well, in reality there are a alot of them, but since they are so short and posted so quickly, they only count as 1 or 2.
I don't think you got the point of that post you just replied to there pal.
Get it now?
- sigs are for wimps.
no text no text no text no text no text no text no text no text no text
Lameness filter, bite my ass.
This article was to illustrate that VHS was very good for making copies, hence the duplicate news.
today's dupe story submission winner is Vladimir Kornea
today's dupe loser is timothy
thanks for playing, Vladimir, and timothy. good tteamwork!
would you like to know more about dupe posting?
today's dupe story submission winner is Vladimir Kornea
today's dupe loser is timothy
thanks for playing, Vladimir, and timothy. good tteamwork!
would you like to know more about dupe posting?
Weird that so many people start about duplicate posts, when such interesting discussions can be held as "Did betamax also include a copy protection mechanism like macrovision right from the start?"
Is it true that a VHS recorder that can record a macrovision-protected signal would be cheaper to make than the current ones that can't, because they don't have to build in macrovision detection?
This is classic Urban Myth revisionism: the writer gets his kicks by simply labelling any common, but old and hard to prove if you weren't there, knowledge as "an Urban Myth" and then sells it to gullible editors.
Complete crap from start to end, just like his insane assertion that the PC was better than the alternatives - what a toss-pot.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Reading the seventh post I began to wonder, is this a duplicate story?
The eighth and ninth post made me realize yes! yes this might just be a duplicate story.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Timothy Lord"
Sent: Wednesday, January 29, 2003 12:03 AM
Subject: Re: Why do you post dupes?
> I'm sorry about that duplicate (and any others) -- this Sunday I was
> pretty much out of it: personal things were unhappy, and I missed the
> story. There is a putative "duplicate catcher" which looks for similar
> words and attempts to point out suspiciously similar stories, but in this
> case it wasn't triggered. Still my fault of course; that duplicate
> catcher, though, does a very good job in general of reducing duplicate
> posts (from me or anyone else).
>
> If I could pull time backwards while preserving present knowledge, I'd
> spot that in the bin and scoff at the dupe, then delete it unread,
> wondering about all the submitters who send in dupes. Now, it's chagrin
> city instead.
>
> Apologies.
>
> Tim
Since one year the crisis of
Now there is not much left of the glory of earlier days. Today's occasional trolls can not catch up to the glorious trolls of the past. What remains are honourable memories.
So it is time to mention some of the great heroes of the past to give them the merits they deserve. Of course, i have forgotten many, so please post any names that you consider worth to be named.
Egg Troll
Trollaxor
Klerck
* Spork
Turd Report
Fecal Troll Matter
Weather Troll
Grammar Nazi
WIPO Troll
According to the article, Betamax had at least as many movies to rent, price was comparable to VHS etc... in other words, when they started out, the non-technical aspects were more or less 50-50 between Betamax and VHS...
So if the 'whole product' argument applied, surely Betamax would have won, as it *also* offered technical superiority?
That means that something had to tip the balance in favour of VHS that wasn't mentioned in the article... and once it had enough market share, Betamax was always going to struggle, as regardless of the 'real whole product', the 'perceived whole product' will always be somewhat less...
2) Like repeating the 3rd grade, we already know the material and feel 'smart'.
3) We get to make offtopic posts without taking as big a karma hit.
4) We get to make offtopic posts without taking as big a karma hit. (ooops! sorry for the dupe!)
Send us your Linux Sysadmin articles.!
Geeky modern art T-shirts
Windows is stuffed down your throat by a monopoly.
Freedom to choose hasn't occurred yet.
He is saying the popular device is the better device, Which is better ? A Toyota or a Aston Martin? Well they sure do sell allot more Toyotas.
Get a free ipod.
maybe we're feelin' the effects of the sql slammer virus...
A friend of mine has an old "System 2000" format VCR, and the quality of it is amazing. Even during fastforward/rewind the image doesn't break up at all. Sadly, I think System 2000 sunk even faster than Betamax did. As for Jack Schofield, I've read a lot of his pieces in the Guardian and get the impression that he's either a newspaper-based troll, or just a self-important opinionated oaf.
Cress, cress, lovely lovely cress
Yep. And it was on Fark 2 days before that.
Where I'm from, it's not an apology unless you're actually going to stop doing it.
Well, Digital Beta lives. Digital Beta tape and drives are still in use at different broadcast centers. These centers get movies from different studios and use these tapes for making house and on air masters for broadcasting. There is no perceptible deterioration between copies and some of the pay per view movies you watch are sometimes broadcast from these tapes or from video servers which were "filled" from these tapes.
Regular Bata tapes and machines were sold in Japan until just a few years ago. IMHO Beta was better at first during the VHS-Beta wars. However, so many manufacturers chose VHS and more money went into upgrading the VHS systems. Over time VHS surpassed Beta in quality.
1. Copy the link location from the article being considered for posting to the front page.
2. Paste that URL into the search field.
3. Post story if and only if no result pops up.
No need for keywords, no extraneous results.
blog
The secondary arguments are risible. The thing about how technology doesn't matter comes quickly (second sentence) to:
Translation: Compact Cassette was here first, and had time to saturate the market next to its competition back then, so it's a better "whole product" because it's got all the infrastructure to support it.
By that way of thinking, gasoline is a better whole product than anything that might try to replace it, isn't it? And hey, examining how the car manufacturors crushed urban rail systems, that's not important -- the "whole product" of cars was better, so we couldn't possibly learn anything about urban planning decisions and how to prevent abuses in future, now, could we?
I'd hate to see this guy doing history. Everything happened because it was for the best... it was all just inevitable, and pay no attention to all those people who had to struggle to get things done.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
will be happy. This is a single case of what happened in consumer technology. Doesn't apply to all markets, all customers, or all products. Enough of this story already!
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
It used to be a joke when /. would dupe a story, but it's gotten out of hand. What's it been, like, five dupes this *week?* C'mon, fucking seriously... put just the least little bit of effort into this? I know it's hard when you see a submission 1000x to remember if it made the cut or not, so when someone re-submits it a day later, you might go ahead and run it. So, either a) hire someone who's job it is is to *not* look at incoming stories and *only* read what gets posted online, so they won't have that cross-memory problem, or b) *write a fscking script!!!!!* (You have people there that can write scripts, right?) Just have it where, below the story submission box is a little box to put keywords into, and when you press 'submit' (or 'preview', right?) it does a quick check of the last 30 days worth of stories to see if it matches. Here's another idea--check the URL! If it's an identical match, there you go. If it's the same *domain*, it throws up a flag, or if whatever follows the last slash (startreklego.html) matches, you get a flag. (Might have to adjust that setting so it looks back one more slash if the final piece is index.*)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
First he says VHS won because there were more tapes and more players available, rather than on the basis of features. But that's not an explanation at all: It boils down to "VHS won because VHS had won." It'd be like saying "Windows has most of the market share because Windows has most of the market share." Well, sure, but why?
But then he goes on to point out a feature of VHS tapes -- their length -- that was better, and that tipped the scales in VHS's favor. This seems to contradict his "whole product" point from the first half of the article: If there was a basic features of VHS tapes that met consumers' needs better than Beta, then it wasn't all those auxiliary things that made VHS popular after all. So he seems simply to be debunking myths about the VHS-Beta story rather than making the larger point he started out with.
How do I get a job at osdn ? Do they also pass out paychecks twice sometimes ?
Here's my suggestion, once an editor notes a duplicate story, change its category to "dupe" then allow users to filter out "dupes" from their pages (haven't seen a JonKatz rant in years...)
Here's the conspiracy comment: considering the number of people that comment on a duplicate story (just to bitch about it being a dupe), Slashdot gets the ad-eyballs with very little effort. There is a built-in impetus to post duplicates to stir traffic. It's a delicate balance but my guess is that they elected timothy to be the dupe-poster and to manage the flow of dupe postings.
And, I'll probably repost this with each dupe. At least each timothy dupe.
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
What this article hints to us is that *If* windows was given away (ie for free), Linux would loose the one thing that JOE PC USER *sees* as the big advantage that Linux has over Windows. Remember, it's all about appearances.
To make an analogy:
If linux was VCR it be a Heath kit project that would be almost Free but require lots of patience to put it together. Once Built it would never eat a tape or miss the taping of a show and rarely ever need repairs or maintenance.
If Windows was a VCR it would already be put toghether for $300. The catch is that it would sometimes eat a tape or miss the taping of a show. Eventually it would break-down and need to be replaced or serviced.
Now make then both Free and choose as if you were Joe PC User that is lasy and non-technical.
The problem is that Linux was built for programers to please other programmers, not Joe PC USER.
Apple is very-very strict on look and feel.
M$ is flexible on look and feel but has a standard.
Linux has a different look and feel for each distro. There is a standard but RH ignores it.
M$ could eventually give away Windows and live off the sale of Office and other buggy but hot-selling SW.
Am I the only one worried?
That MS makes the best software and McD's makes by far the best food on the entire plannet. Britney is the best musician alive, and some huge state school offers an education that far outclasses any Ivy League school. China and India are the best countries in which to live and bud light is the best beer. Ford and GM make the best cars. Excuse me while I finish off my microbrews, escargot, veal, and caviar and find a nice cliff over which to drive my German engineered uberwundercar. If this is the best this planet has to offer, there's no sense in continuing.
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
When you choose compact cassette, you are also buying into a vast infrastructure of capabilities, services and support. These include the availability of cheap cassettes on every high street, cheap personal stereos, and the ability to use the same format for a wide range of applications (personal stereo, portable radio/cassette players, in the car, in your hi-fi stack).
It seems to me there's a chicken-and-egg issue here. Are the products "superior" because more people like them, or do more people like them because they're superior? This guy is arguing that besides technical aspects, there are other factors that enter into a consumer's buying decision (duh!), and that one of those is the existing level of acceptance and support of the product in the market (ie, availability). But he also says that the products aren't superior anyway.
Despite the author's anecdotal "evidence" disputing the technical superiority of the items in question, there are cases where a given product has been proven to be technically superior through rigorous studies (see my sig) but still failed, usually because the inferior product was first to market and became entrenched. And even in cases where the products were introduced around the same time, other factors such as marketing budgets can make or break a product.
So my question is, "Is this a good thing?". It seems to me that if we care about improvement in technology, we should work to reduce the inertia in the system, and eliminate factors that ought not be relevant. This article is meaningless in that context, since it doesn't address this question.
Read my keyboard review.
>technological aspects are a small and often uninteresting part of the decision. huh?? who would have got the product off the ground if it were not for the technolgical convenience and superiority?? The "complete product" takes years to be bear fruition..in the introduction stage of the product life cycle, many other things matter. there were no mass production of tapes, thousands of movie-rental stores when VHS first came out...
Ask the average tivo owner what quality level they select for their seinfeld reruns.
Haha, too true. When I first got my Tivo (60Hr Series2), I recorded stuff at all the various quality levels. High quality was too disk-consuming, the level below that (good? I forget) was also too disk-hungry and not noticably different than high quality. Basic quality seemed kind of appalling on the first few programs I recorded -- even my wife, who's about as nontechnical as they come was noticing some artifacts.
So I stuck with medium quality for a while, but I noticed I just wasn't getting the retention I wanted when I had a lot of movies recorded, so I started switching to basic quality on some stuff, and lo and behold I noticed that it wasn't all that bad.
I've been sold on basic since then, but I've noticed its kind of all over the map. Some stuff I find indistinguishable from medium quality, some stuff is pretty appalling. Music videos, for example, have too many jump cuts and quick camera movements -- the quality there sucks. But a lot of other content appears just fine, especially content originally shot on film. Even old Rockford episodes are good, and especially good are recordings of filmed content shown on digital channels; analog noise from analog channels must hinder the compressor.
Anyway, you're right -- basic quality has become more than good enough, at least until a do a disk upgrade and get a DVD recorder to copy stuff too, but even then I may stick with the longest content length...
As long as we are at it. In addition to VHS being better than Betamax and Windows being better than MacOS we must say crack cocaine is better than milk, Democrats are better than Republicans, Hitler was better than FDR, and Oreos were better than Hydrox.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Picking the dominant player on the grounds that competitors are weak, unreliable, and have less "resources" is just flawed logic.
In a sense, it's really a variation the Prisoner's Dilemma - should I choose what's best for ME if it's going to screw the next guy?
Well - if you ALWAYS choose the dominant market player, and if everyone does that, the dominant market player soon becomes the ONLY market player - then everybody gets screwed (except the vendor), because just because a company has the theoretical resources to create a "best of breed" product, does not mean that they'll sink those resources into doing it.
An alternate argument could be - if you're a believer in Capitalism, you must accept that Monopolies are fundamentally opposed to the theory behind why Capitalism is a great system. (because competition is what drives Vendors to produce the best product for the marketplace, not simply having more resources). Therefore, if you're a red-blooded American, or a staunch believer in freedom and Capitalism, ALWAYS choosing the top player (whether by virtue of them just being the top player, or whether they really do offer a superior value at that point in time) is really an UnAmerican, UnPatriotic choice. One should ALWAYS consider supporting the "underdog" from time to time.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
wow, 200 almost clever comments! i have a sneaking suspicion that people found out that this was a duplicate story
Please try to avoid duplicates. You all have the opportunity to work on one of the busiest and most interesting web sites in existence, yet you apparently don't have the time to read it yourselves. Please look through the last week's articles before posting. Reading a week's worth of summaries (at 10-20 per day * 7 days) should take you no more than an hour or so.
If you have no interest at all in reading the site (which is a shame-- apparently doing something for a living can ruin ANYTHING) hire a proofreader with an english degree. This person will be able to singlehandedly reduce duplicate posts, grammar and spelling errors, and verify links before posting articles.
If THAT costs too much money, pick a random whining slashdotter and buy them a text pager. Send them the article blurbs before publish and I'll bet that they can identify it as a dupe in 30 seconds. Pay for the pager, and give them $5 per article verified or something.
But PLEASE... work on the dupes and the grammar errors. And stop deleting posts like this one that try to address the problem. That's just unnecessary invisible censorship. If you've got time to read all these posts and pick offtopic ones to delete, you have more than enough time to make sure you don't post duplicates.
(Note: there was a large thread of posts about this in this article, but it has mysteriously vanished.)
betamax is long in the grave, so why the hect should I care?
An idea: let's debate which was better: BSD (not FreeBSD) 4.2 (that's right, from 1984) and Linux 2.4. Makes as much sense.
This guy argues that VHS should have been superior because it won. Has Beta won, it would have been the better product.
I can't see why these people get paid to write.
Imagine the thought processes:
"Windows is way better that Linux, otherwise it wouldn't dominate".
"But Linux has so much better ".
"Why, yes, but as a WHOLE product, Windows is berre, otherwise it wouldn't dominate".
Can we check if this is a jonKatz troll in disguise? He's been awfully quiet, and this article has his style all over it... >:)
The thought process here is that since something is more prevelant, and therefore has more facets available to it. By this rationale, economy cars are better than luxury cars. This idea of thinking breeds out innovation, as innovative products always start small and with an even smaller audience. Compliance does not breed right.
Nope. This was all about marketing decisions and unexpected consequences. Sony invented both technologies, VHS and Beta. They made the decision to keep the best for themselves, Beta, and market the other, VHS, to the rest of the world. When Joe/Jane Sixpack went to the VCR section and saw only Beta on Sony products but VHS on everything else, the (uninformed but understandable) logic was that VHS must be better since so many more manufacturers used it instead of Beta. The rest is history.
An even earlier comment on VCRs. Ampex was the original inventor/marketer. They came out with their system shortly after color TVs hit the market. It was built into a color TV and had Play only, no rewind, pause, record, etc. Their target market has just purchased color TVs, who needed a second one and what advantage did it offer over going to the movies? So they sold it to the Japanese who added the appropriate features in a stand alone unit. Much of American business still exhibits similar behavior.
I hereby offer my services to help avoid dupes. I do not promise to be perfect, but through simple use of a system I call "Memory" coupled with an advanced parser I call "Reading", I should be able to avoid most duplicates. Through years of training, I think that I will be able to sustain this "Reading" at the necessary 20 paragraphs-per-day level needed to keep up with all the articles. As a fail-safe, I am going to pick keywords from the article and enter them into slashdot's search box. I will do this for $5 an article (this is negotiable, but comes with an expectation of raises if performance is good), and an "I work for Slashdot" t-shirt or two each year I work here.
Yes, I posted this anonymously to avoid wounding my oh-so-precious karma. But I'm logged in, and I'm sure they can tell who I am or grab my IP if they want to.
Timothy has time to read hundreds of posts and delete those he doesn't like (he nabbed a whole thread of dupe bitching today), yet he can't be bothered to read a week's worth of article blurbs to avoid in-the-same-week dupes.
HIRE ME. I'm cheap. I'd love to work for slashdot.
The Beta formats used in industrial and broadcast applications were/are not the same as consumer Betamax. The brand is the same, and some of the engineering principles and designs may have been similar between "Beta" formats, but the signal quality is worlds apart. No broadcast engineer worth their salt would let a consumer Betamax-grade signal on the air except in an emergency.
I've often heard the argument that Beta lost the race because they refused to allow pornography distributed on their tapes.
Is there any truth in this?
Awe c'mon laugh!!!, Dupes happen!!!
Regards,
Ryan Pritchard
Fun Extends All Basic Life Expectancies
Awe c'mon laugh!!!, Dupes happen!!!
Regards,
Ryan Pritchard
Fun Extends All Basic Life Expectancies
Of course the Slashdot editors need some ribbing for dupe stories, but why don't we tease the submitter of the story as well? It is so blatant that this was a dupe story since it has only been about a week since the original story, so why did someone submit the story again. There is more than enough Slashdot love to go around.
the real reason that VHS won out wasn't that it was better. All of us techies who were teenager then knew Betamax was better. VHS won because the PORNO
Industry used that format and I guess there were more PRONO VHS users than Betamax viewers.
Oh, those awful Slashdot editors! How dare they make mistakes! I'm demanding my $0 back immediately! I'll report them to the FCC! No, wait Slashdotters hate the FCC, so I'll report then to the EFF for some reason!
Waaaaaaaaa!
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
Pfft!
The article is nothing more than an interesting headline. Nobody has ever disagreed that VHS had market advantages despite its inferior picture quality... well nobody's disagreed who's ever stepped foot in a video rental in the past decade.
In fact the only reason you ever hear anybody saying that 'betamax was better.." is when they are making *exactly* the same fucking hacknayed point that this joker makes.
His article is nothing more than an excuse to run the eye-catching title. He has absolutely nothing new to say.
A few points:
The public will choose the least expensive option that meets the minimum commodity criteria comprehended by the public.
What if the public just doesn't know about an option at all because of under-representation through advertising relative to a clearly inferior option?
What if the public doesn't trust a source with which it is not familier?
In 1985 features like pre-emptive multitasking, blit accelerated color GUIs, and multi-channel digital sound were dismissed as unprofessional by those people who were used to IBM/MS-DOS and Apple products available at the time. Ultimately the market picked up on these features, but they had to be educated though exposure from all the right sources before acceptance.
--Jonathan--
VHS did not beat beta because of video quality. It was because of sony pulling the machine of the market because of a copyright lawsuit (sound familiar?). VHS went ahead and put out its inferior machines in spite of the lawsuit and won the toe hold in the American home. In any video studio beta was king and probably still is in some. What is the point of this article? Crappy is good enough for most people? That would explain the popularity of Microsoft ;-)
...because good is dumb!
Even though a large part of Schofield's "whole product" theory seems tailored to match the situation, he does have one thing very right - consumers as a whole usually focus on non-technical aspects of products.
What would have been much more interesting would have been thoughts as to why people acted this way, not just sitting back and saying that they did. Hindsight is 20/20 after all.
"There are people who do not love their fellow human being, and I _hate_ people like that!" - Tom Lehrer
One thing kept hitting me on the head like a ballpeen hammer while reading the article: he was discussing products which had been around for years, in terms of services and qualities which were not realized until some years after the original product was first introduced.
When the IBM PC was first introduced, it didn't have a huge software base, not many people owned one, and repair shops weren't well-trained in repairing one. So in terms of "the whole product", the IBM PC was WORSE than any other computer existing at the time.
Due to gradual changes over time, plus decisions such as allowing other motherboard manufacturers to make "clones" of the IBM PC, the IBM PC developed the additional qualities of "the whole product" that made it so much better than its competition. In other words, any newly introduced product is automatically WORSE than any competing product, if you are considering "the whole product". By definition, all competing products released before the new product have more of the qualities attributed to "the whole product" than the new product.
This leads me to what I think is the logical conclusion of "the whole product": "Our product, though technologically inferior to anything else anyone can come up with, is, by 'the whole product' standards, vastly superior to anything else on the market. Don't waste your time marketing anything other than our product, since anything else doesn't stack up to our product in terms of 'the whole product'."
Sounds like a Micro$oftism to me: anything to discourage competition, as long as it can't be directly traced back to us.
All I can think is that "the whole product" must be a relatively new marketing concept, since if we'd had it back in the days of the horse and buggy, the Model-T would only be available to "obsolete product collectors" on the telegraph version of E-Bay, and delivered by the Pony Express.
Damn Brits, what do they know? :-) Actually, if you are comparing VHS/Beta recorded in Pal standard rather than NTSC, you may not see as big a difference. Pal TV standard has a better overall picture (more lines than NTSC's 550). Since the source is better you are going to get a better recording, even on VHS. People from the states always comment how good the TV picture was when they visit the UK.
I know that Philips is not well known in the U.S., but in this discussion Video2000 was forgotten. It was superior to both Betamax and VHS. The Video2000 system was the first system to stop, because the American studios certainly wouldn't support a Dutch firm! It wasn't until the '80 "The Dutch strike back" with the Compact Disc