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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.
Really, the story really doesn't examine superiority, but it does raise a point in a vague way but unfortunately reaches too stiff of a conclusion, particularly the conclusion that the best is always what market chooses, or the market chooses what is the best.
I am uncomfortable with the idea of assigning "best" to the dominant player simply because it dominates sales, which the article seems to imply in ways, and that it really isn't any better of a way to evaluate how good something is. Is McDonald's the best at burgers simply because they have the highest sales? The only thing that McDonald's really did right was by hitting a happy medium of price, quality, speed and convenience.
What the article does get right is by showing a lot of reasons why a different product didn't do as well, and shows why being better doesn't mean you'll dominate. Does better marketing really make a better product? I don't think so, it really only improves sales.
There are lots of choices. Which choices make the best sense _depends_on_the_situation_. Sure, infrastructure and support matters. Sure, price matters. But there's usually a reason the competing, more expensive, less supported products still exist despite those obstacles: there is _still_ a market for it. The answer to the issue lies in what you plan to do with it.
Did VHS win? In the consumer market, yes, and probably overall production volume, yes. But the price and library concerns don't affect video professionals the same way. As you point out, Beta was the choice for a lot of TV stations. TV stations don't care whether rental stores had Beta copies of Vampire Vixens from Outer Space, because they generally don't use the decks that way.
Beta could have won the consumer market in the long term, but apparently there were too many valid reasons for it not to work out.
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Ugh.
Here's my summary of the article (deep embedded wisdom and all) in one million words or less:
People don't buy things to *have* things, people buy things to *do* stuff. Focus on letting them do stuff.
For example: I got into the IS/IT business practically by accident because I've been spending 5-10 hours a day with computers every day since I wrote my first AppleBASIC programs in junior high school. For me, this is a hobby, a pastime, what I think about first in the morning and last at night (other than my wife, of course). For me, the point of having a home network with a fast internet connection is having the home network with the fast internet connection. I guess I'm like a plumber who's *really* *into* connecting pipes together; I could give a rat's ass about what comes out of the faucet - that's the water company's problem.
As a result, when I've gotten bored with my current stable of computer toys I do surprisingly little with my PC every day: I check my email, I read
If I had the money, I'm the guy that would have bought Betamax, but I am not most people.
Now, let's say I had a friend named Bob, so has a different hobby... for example... say... collecting transvestite GI-Joe action figures. Before 1995 Bob's life is an isolated wasteland. In fact, if transvestite GI-Joes carry any significant weight in determining how he goes about the process of living, then he is quite likely the only guy in town he can relate to. PERIOD.
Since the proliferation of the internet and community communication services like AOL, however, Bob has found an entire universe of people out there who not only share his peculiar action-figure interest, but are into even weirder things he likes such as writing religeous haiku about TV anchorwoman and investigative reporter Paula Zahn.
Bob is a VHS buyer.
For him, $22.95/month for access to AOL's lame chat rooms is a way around the inherent unfairness in the universe that left religiously poetic transvestite-GI-Joe-loving Paula Zahn fans too geographically scattered to have any sort of imapact, especially during the 60's, when they *really* could have done some damage. For him, the computer is incidental; it's a tool to another end. If Guatemalan-Death-Lizard owners could find and communicate with other Guatemalan-Death-Lizard owners for free using a toaster, they'd have one in every room of their houses.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
There is a difference between arguing about the theoretical quality of a format and the various implementations of the format. There is no real correlation between price and picture quality in current VCRs, and I suspect that has always been the case. Does anyone actually watch or test VCRs before buying them? Maybe your house had a poor quality expensive VHS and your friend's had an excellent quality cheap Beta. Perhaps you could have found examples where VHS was better than Beta.
My understanding (and recollection) of the situation was that, in general, Beta had slightly better picture quality, but VHS had longer recording times. It seems plausible that people would think that better recording times were more important than better picture quality; and that the "better" format did win.
At any rate BOTH of them suck in picture quality and better choices have been available for more than 10 years. Laser Disks have much better picture quality than VHS or Beta tapes, but nobody bought them. Super VHS is much better than VHS or Beta, but not many people were willing to pay more for it. I stopped renting VHS tapes more than 10 years ago due to the poor quality of the video (and especially sound); I was lucky enough to be able to rent laser disks instead. I should also point out that people are still renting tapes, even though DVDs are way better.
By the time VHS beat Beta, there were already better formats than either VHS or Beta, so I am not sure that there are any lessons to be learned other than the mass market doesn't care much about quality. The "best" product does win in the market place; it is just that the "quality" of the various choices does not have a very large weighting factor in the overall judgment.
-- Pot is safer than Beer
The biggest problem I see with technology comparisons is that most people focus on one small part of the whole and decide that makes it the better. How the whole works together doesn't ever seem to factor into the equation. VHS beat Beta, it beat it not because it was first (it wasn't), not because more content was available on it (originally that wasn't the case, Beta had a huge head start), and not because Sony fucked up the licencing (they didn't, Beta was available to be licenced and was indeed licenced, and Beta players were as easily available and as cheap as their VHS counterparts.)
BetaMax failed because it was crap. It was originally incapable of being used to tape anything much longer than Seinfeld, and at its peak managed to record no more than about an hour. That's a pretty serious limitation. That's why movie makers stopped releasing content in the format. That's why consumers didn't want it.
Did it have higher picture quality? God knows. I never saw the two together, and I doubt many people did. But is picture quality the only valid measure of a system's overall usability? God no! If it can't do the job people want it for, it isn't any good.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.