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Correct. Where there is more than marginal utility,
it lives on. The comparison in the paper was to
the Mac where having a small slice of the market was
enough to sustain it. That should have been true of
Betamax in the home market, but it wasn't and not because
of a strong partner or even aggressive marketing. Sony
spent millions and JVC/Matshusta/RCA didn't spend a dime.
The market decided, not the vendors.
The video retail networks were weaker than soda water.
It was the customer demand for movies (watch only once
and seldom repeat; movies and music aren't software.
Important to note that) that created the dynamic.
Best use isn't enough UNLESS there is repeat use of the tool.
The market for schema tools to repeat users is what size
if you start to split that up into 'best used for'? In
other words, is a marginal utility market big enough? Or
should the solution be a niche vendor who supplies support
into the .Net framework? Can that be done and still get
all the nice productivity features of VS?
len
-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Kearney [mailto:wkearney@syndic8.com]
> The weird thing is, Betamax didn't just lose, it disappeared.
In the retail market, yes. In the commercial video production market the
technology used in Betamax lives on today. At least in places that haven't
made the switch to digital. What bearing this has on the current discussion
is questionable but it does suggest that not all applications benefit from
the same tools. In the case of professional video production the choices
were often based on understanding what actually worked better all around
(performance as well as price). It might be a fair statement to say the
software tool 'industry' is doing nowhere near an effective job at
differentiating what solutions are best for any given applications.
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