Bob Browning's blog

You are in a pub and you hear someone say “that is Betamax vs VHS all over again”. What is that about? It is an interesting story which might effect your next career move, so listen up.

Betamax vs VHS

In the 70’s and 80’s, Video Cassette Recorders (VCRs) were in every house. The pioneers were Sony and they produced the Betamax standard, but the rest of the industry clubbed together and produced a rival standard VHS. We had a Betamax when we lived in the States in the early 80’s, and at the time that was quite common. We bought another a few years later when we got back to the UK.

Then we realised our mistake. The Betamax shelves at our local Blockbuster rental store got smaller and smaller and eventually disappeared. Betamax was dead and VHS had taken over. It is universally recognised that Betamax is superior with better playback quality. It was just a bit more expensive, and didn’t have the power of multiple alternative brands marketing it. Definitely the best product on the market, but without being able to rent tapes for it, semi-useless.

ISO vs TCP/IP

In the 1980s everyone knew that the future of networking was the ISO (International Standards Organisation) protocol stack. Somewhere in the States there was a stopgap system called TCP/IP but ISO was the real deal and we had to wait for that.

I remember meeting an American in the office of a financial institution in London. When he gave me his card it had this funny string of names with full stops and this weird ‘@’ sign that I had only seen on an invoice. He explained email to me and it was obvious that it was a big deal. Email was a working system that ran on TCP/IP, and that was the end of ISO. The ISO standard is still there. The basic model is still useful. But the protocol stack is pretty much history. (Check out this link, the story is fascinating.)

CP/M vs PC-DOS

Then of course CP/M was way better than PC-DOS (I already covered that in a post).

And I will write a post about the CODASYL database standard that you have never heard about, but was the future once.

What is the lesson from these stories?

The winners in technology markets are not always the ‘best’. International standards are not always what gets adopted. So if you are deciding which new technology to bet on for your career or your new project, what factors are important.

• Quality. It has to be ‘good enough’ or it won’t fly. But ‘best’? Nah…
• Solid supplier. Can someone support me? Will we get updates?
• Can I find people with the skills?
• Fashion. What are the cool kids buying? Yes that kind-of matters, otherwise why the success of Python? But beware; it doesn’t guarantee longevity.
• My organisations technical strategy – will it fit in?
• Cost – obviously.

Above all, like every decision in business it comes down to one key question:

If it all goes pear-shaped will I get fired?