> 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.
