seen at [raelity bytes]
This Guardian article asserts that Betamax superiority over VHS is an urban myth, received wisdom based upon a misunderstanding of what makes one technology better than another — it’s the market, not the lab.
I would challenge the assertion that the market is always what decides the best technology — but this article does provide some evidence that the technical merits of Betamax were overstated, leaving the relatively simple differentiator of tape-length to be the deciding factor in which technology won wider adoption. I don’t really buy the author’s arguments that market forces prove that compact (”normal”) cassettes are better than DAT; there’s a case where you can really detect technical differences, and of course anyone who knows history can also see how politics messed things up.
(As an aside, this post was made with NetNewsWire Pro, the first time I’ve used it to blog an entry I read on another blog. It works quite nicely, and even aside from the integration with my news aggregator, the editing features are very nice. Of course, while my machine has been down, I hear that Kung-Log has also improved a lot, so I don’t know if I’m switching yet…
