Re: AdaMax? (was: ada to C++ translation)

["Rob Veenker" <veenker@xs4all.nl>]

In this respect there was even a third VCR system called Video 2000 by
Philips during the mid '80s.
It had great quality (like no lines in still images or when playing at high
speed) and you could turn the tape and play side B !
Somehow it too got squashed in the middle and Philips even decided to switch
to VHS completely.
I guess marketing is more important than quality... sigh.

Rob Veenker


"Ted Dennison" <dennison@telepath.com> wrote in message
news:4519e058.0203041210.5f878d07@posting.google.com...
> "Ira D. Baxter" <idbaxter@semdesigns.com> wrote in message
news:<3c838b53@giga.realtime.net>...
> > But I'm not the marketplace, and it doesn't
> > always do what we personally think is technically
> > rational.
>
> Clearly you have to go where you think your money is as a tool vendor.
> That's perfectly understandable. However, you need to be very careful
> in making cross-market analogies...
>
> > If you remember BetaMax VCRs, they were technically
> > better than VHS.  But the only VCR survivors
> > made the arguably rational business decision to go with VHS.
>
> Sigh. The old "BetaMax" argument again?
>
> The driving of BetaMax from the marketplace was not irrational at all,
> technically or economicly. First off, BetaMax wasn't inarguably
> technicly superior. Beta format had a more limited recording time than
> VHS, and that was important to some people.
>
> But more importantly, BetaMax was a proprietary standard that one
> company owned and tried to milk as a revenue source in and of itself
> (by refusing to release it to other companies w/o huge license fees).
> VHS was a free industry standard. So suddenly there were 2 VCR
> universes: one with no real competition between VCR makers and one
> with oodles of it. Tapes didn't work with both, so consumers got to
> choose the winner. A bit of basic microeconomics will tell you that
> the result of this situation is almost a forgone conclusion.
>
> What does all of this have to do with Ada? Damn near nothing. If we
> had to make an analogy into the videocassete market, VCR's (and their
> formats) would be machine languages (CPUs, OS's, programming
> platforms, etc.), tapes would be the executable programs, and
> programming languages would be sort of analogous to the the camera
> techniques used to film the original shows before they transfered to
> tape. If damn near everyone else uses an inferior or inefficient one,
> there's no real reason that has to affect a content developer's choice
> at all. A tool vendor would certianly prefer to make tools targeted to
> that larger camera technique user-base (assuming that market isn't
> oversaturated). But this has nothing whatsever to do with Beta vs.
> VHS.
>
> --
> T.E.D.
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