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.

Comments

first post!

[yobbo]

oh wait... dupe

second post!

Why it was better....

[telstar]

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.....

Re:Why it was better....

[Paul E. Loeb]

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. :)

slashdot's new theme...

[Anonymous Coward]

news for amnesiacs, stuff that mattered

Beta will always be better for DUPLICATION....

[malakai]

know what i mean little timothy?

wink, wink, nudge nudge... say no more.

The real reason VHS was better than betamax..

[Anonymous Coward]

and all /. editors know this:

Better Copies.

Model T Ford

[Nick Driver]

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.

Re:Model T Ford

[Jeff DeMaagd]

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.

Re:Model T Ford

[Bodrius]

The market doesn't choose what is "best" per se, and I don't think the article points in that direction.

The market chooses what the market WANTS.

According to some definitions of product, including the "whole product" idea used in the article, a "good product" is a product that matches the market demands.

In that sense, the "best product" is the one that gives the market what it wants, and by the nature of the market, the dominant players tend to do that in a free market.

That doesn't mean the product is "better" from a technical, moral, or whatever other point of view you want, except from the point of view that it meets the desires of consumers.

The consumers might want inefficient vehicles, lousy paperback novels, kitschy pop culture or education aimed at the attention span of a 3-year-old on a glucose overdose. That doesn't mean that they're better vehicles, literature, culture or education, but if the public is more willing to pay for those, by definition they're better "products".

The funny thing is...

[Repton]

...that there's all these duplicate comments complaining about how the story is a duplicate story...

Re:DUPE!

[Waffle Iron]

Didn't this story run like yesterday?

Just like a good movie on a VCR tape, this story worth rewinding and playing again and again.

I never get tired of VHS vs. Betamax flamewars. Nothing could be more compelling, relevant or engaging than debating the relative merits of these 20-year old tape formats a few more times.

history repeatimg

[chrismacmahon]

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.

Perhaps this article can also explain

[E1ven]

Why Slashdot is better than Kuro5hin.
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, /because/ it is an amzingly 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

Re:first post!

[ubugly2]

The best part of slashdot is that it is possible to get first post in the same story..TWICE

A request for trolling

[Lord Bitman]

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.

Ever see the movie....

[Anonymous Coward]

Groundhog Day?

Ever think you were in it?

Ever think the slashdot moderators were in it?