That might not be the best analogy. The most commonly-cited reason for
Beta losing out to VHS seems to be the initial limitation of Beta to
1-hour tapes, which wasn't enough to record a movie from TV, or to play
back a rented one without switching tapes partway through. By the time
Beta increased its tape length, VHS had basically caught up from a
quality standpoint, and its market share had reached the tipping point
anyway.
I'm not entirely sure that TCP/IP and the other IETF RFCs became
established because of restrictions placed on OSI. I was under the
impression that OSI was also insanely complicated and that the IETF
standards were much cheaper to implement from a technical standpoint.
And, from a product standpoint, in the mid-90s, there were still a lot
of bets being placed on closed online services like AOL, MSN, and
Compuserve.
-William
David Fiander wrote:
Walter,
Well the obvious commercial example, sort of is that old favourite:
Beta (for which Sony charged a license fee and controlled who could
produce media) vs VHS (for which there was either no fee or a much
lower one, and not oversight of media producers).
On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 12:28 PM, Andrew
Hankinson<andrew.hankin...@gmail.com> wrote:
Have a look at the ongoing battles between MPEG4 and Ogg for the browser
video space. I don't know of your second criteria for b), however - not many
people are using Ogg (yet)
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2009/07/06/ogg-theora-h-264-and-the-html-5-browser-squabble/
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/07/decoding-the-html-5-video-codec-debate.ars
-Andrew
On 13-Jul-09, at 12:22 PM, Walter Lewis wrote:
Are there any blindingly obvious examples of instances where
a) a standards group produced a standard published by a body which
charged for access to it
and
b) a alternative standards groups produced a competing standard that was
openly accessible
and the work of group a) was rendered totally irrelevant because most
non-commercial work ignored it in favour of b).
My instinct is to quote the battle between OSI (ISO) and TCP/IP (IETF
RFCs). Does that strike others as appropriate?
Any examples closer to the library world?
Walter Lewis
