Last Major Supplier Calls It Quits For VHS

thefickler writes "The last major supplier of VHS videotapes is ditching the format in favor of DVD, effectively killing the format for good. This uncharitable commentator has this to say: 'Will VHS be missed? Not ... with videos being brittle, clunky, and rather user-unfriendly. But they ushered in a new era that was important to get to where we are today. And for that reason, the death of VHS is rather sad. Almost as sad as the people still using it.'" At least my dad's got the blank-tape market cornered.

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VHS is Dying

[A12m0v]

VHS has been dying for years. The death progressed slowly at first, but of late, it has taken a turn for the worse and is nearly complete. The death of VHS has followed several stages.

Suicide is Painless

In 2000, chief *VHS developer Matt Damon left the project after penning a long, meandering suicide note, loosely based on a novel by renowned playwright Buzz Aldrin.

FreeVHS used to be fun. It used to be about doing things the right way. It used to be something that you could sink your teeth into when the mundane chores of programming for a living got you down. It was something cool and exciting; a way to spend your spare time on an endeavour you loved that was at the same time wholesome and worthwhile.

It's not anymore. It's about bylaws and committees and reports and milestones, telling others what to do and doing what you're told. It's about who can rant the longest or shout the loudest or mislead the most people into a bloc in order to legitimise doing what they think is best. Individuals notwithstanding, the project as a whole has lost track of where it's going, and has instead become obsessed with process and mechanics.

Netcraft Weighs In

Not long after Matt's suicide, the United Nations Commission for Wresting Control of the DNS Root Servers from the Imperialist United States ("UN-USA")'s Netcraft project weighed in with its final judgement. In typical Netcraft fashion, the writer kept to the facts and looked to the numbers:

It is now official. Netcraft has confirmed: *VHS is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *VHS community when IDC confirmed that *VHS market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *VHS has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *VHS is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin [amazingkreskin.com] to predict *VHS's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *VHS faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *VHS because *VHS is dying. Things are looking very bad for *VHS. As many of us are already aware, *VHS continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

FreeVHS is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeVHS developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeVHS is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

OpenVHS leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenVHS. How many users of NetVHS are there? Let's see. The number of OpenVHS versus NetVHS posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetVHS users. VHS/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetVHS posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of VHS/OS. A recent article put FreeVHS at about 80 percent of the *VHS market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeVHS users. This is consistent with the number of FreeVHS Usenet posts.

Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeVHS went out of business and was taken over by VHSI who sell another troubled OS. Now VHSI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that *VHS has steadily declined in market share. *VHS is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *VHS is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante

Re:No players on the market

[Anonymous Coward]

English motherfucker

Re:No players on the market

[drinkypoo]

Consider, for example, the letters and diaries written during the Civil War with electronic forms of communications related to the recent war in Iraq.

I suspect that relatively few letters written during the Civil War are related to the recent war in Iraq, and that even fewer of them were written with electronic means.

The former is housed in museums and is repeatedly poured over by writers and scholars of every sort

Usually, people try to avoid pouring things on historical documents.

while the latter is stored unceremoniously in Outlook and Yahoo inboxes, on transient blogs, and similarly transient backup tapes of White House email servers.

Or on gmail.

Riddle me this, Batman: how many of the digital data storage devices that we discard are destroyed when we are done using them?

In fact, using nothing more than electron microscopy and a lot of processing, it's possible to read overwritten data.

It is highly likely that some new branch of physics, or even one not yet fully exploited like quantum mechanics, will give us still further abilities in this realm, to the point where we are able to recover still more obscured data.

In summary: Pay more attention to what you are writing.