Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Martin@nezumi.demon.co.uk (Martin Tom Brown)]

In article <dewar.873171868@merv> dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu "Robert Dewar" writes:

> Paul says
> 
> <<Technical superiority is not just a matter of having gee-whiz features,
> it is a matter of doing a better job.>>
> 
> Sure, but who judges what is a better job. The answer is that the only
> person who can judge is the consumer. The VHS vs Beta example is a good
> one from this point of view. The tecnical folks at Sony thought that
> image quality was *the* important technical quality. But they were wrong,
> and they paid for their mistake. In fact playing time was much more
> important to the public.

The crucial factor which made VHS the business success was that VHS
built up a larger library of prerecorded films available (ie software).
Sony vastly underestimated the importance of software sales involved, 
and VHS courted the film producers so cornering the market.

Once you start judging by market success you get into the hairy zone
where having a marketting department which sounds plausible enough
to get people to buy, and a product cheap enough that it's too much
trouble to complain allows you to have a completely useless "success".
The early phase of pyramid selling scams fits this model.
 
> Now some techie may say "stupid public, they don't know what is important",
> but it is such misjudgments by technical people on what is important that
> leaves quite a trail of business disasters behind.

Misjudgements by marketting people are *far* worse.
I worked on a couple of projects which matched all specifications, 
but failed because the marketting research was entirely spurious.
It only became clear something was desparately wrong when the sales
people tried to sell the finished product.
 
> An interesting case is gathering steam now, there is a question of whether
> the new digital TV transmission capability should be used for HDTV, or
> more conventional channels. It is beginning to look more and more as though
> the public and the hence the networks, prefer more conventional channels.
> 
> Now, no doubt some technical folks will get most upset that as a result
> the wondrous x by y resolution of HDTV will never see the light of day,

You can already watch it on a (slightly) incompatible standard in Japan,
and there were test transmissions at least as early as '93

> And, going back to your definition, what does "doing a better job" mean?
> Who judges this?

The hard line answer is the one which adds most to the bottom line.
It doesn't matter how well it works provided people are satisified,
or at least content enough not to complain (too much).
 
> For example, given two VCR's, one with amazing new features, and the other
> with solid reliability, which is doing the better job.
> 
> For me, I would far rather rely on the consumer to make the decision of
> what features are or are not important and thus constitute the basis
> of answering this question!

Most consumers are actually unable to drive their VCR's :(

There are many variables, people are too easily persuaded by adverts.
Software in particular is *very* vulnerable to creeping featurism,
at the cost of both robustness and useability. ie Bloatware.

Another pending technical superiority (and cost) versus marketting
power and low build cost fight is with the new 56k modem protocols. 
The present score is that one sort of works, and the other doesn't. 
However, it looks like the cheaper one will win.

Regards,
-- 
Martin Brown  <martin@nezumi.demon.co.uk>     __                CIS: 71651,470
Scientific Software Consultancy             /^,,)__/