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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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