Han Maenen writes: > I distrust market forces. They do not necessarily boost the > good things. They made inferior standards like VHS Video > and the MSDOS PC the global ones. I think you are confusing "technically good" with "good." VHS had one advantage over BETA at first: longer record time. While BETA had a better picture, clearly customers preferred the longer record time. VHS was the *better* solution, when the differences were weighted by customer preferences. As to MS-DOS and PCs, I'd be the first to admit that Microsoft/IBM won over Apple and Amiga due to marketing superiority rather than technical superiority. But, that is also part of the mix. Many, many products that are superior never see the light of day or fail to reach their potential due to poor marketing. The problem is that the only way to avoid this is to let a small group of people decide what is best for everyone, and very frequently what is "best" is only obvious in hindsight. The cure is far worse than the disease. Marcus will no doubt chime in here about Microsoft being an effective monopoly. That may be the case now, but it certainly wasn't in 1981, when Apple was a much larger company than Microsoft. > It is just as well that we did not allow market forces to > establish global TV standards. Then we might have NTSC here > instead of PAL. I have heard things about NTSC. And I know > about the joke: Never Twice the Same Color. This is an example exactly opposite of the point you want to make. NTSC is a *government mandated* standard! If American broadcasters and worldwide TV manufacturers had had the freedom, NTSC would have died out many years ago. But, no, instead we get stuck in government-moderated battles over HDTV, and decades later still have crummy television. Having some "experts" pick and mandate a TV standard leaves us far worse off than had the market been able to change with technology. Jim Elwell
