turned out to be wrong. Well some of them anyway.
Three years ago to the day, I posted this. And I was wrong about a couple things. Vista wasn't even a heroic failure and the PS3 didn't become the must have console. Inexplicably it was the runt of the the litter, the Nintendo Wii, that conquered all before it. After the failures of the N64 and the Gamecube who would have predicted that? As it turns out no-one did.
But I did get some things right. Surveys still prove what they were designed to prove, Blu-ray versus HD-DVD (RIP) continued to be prefixed by "just like VHS versus Betamax" so that people would get the point*. More bands released albums that were a "stunning return to form" and of course you can still get a DFS sofa at a massive discount with three years interest free credit.
*You know, way back in the day I can't believe that I didn't post a thing nailing my colours to the Blu-ray camp. It was always going to win the HD format war. Why? Very simple. When Betamax was launched, it took Sony a (fatally) long time to licence the technology to other manufacturers. Too late really as JVC had already signed up the big ones (Panasonic / Hitachi / Sharp) and were busy walloping whatever badge of convenience on the machines they made (Ferguson / Baird / Telefunken / Nordemende / Solara / Sansui and the rest). Sony were left with Toshiba (along with it's Teleton and General guises), NEC, Sanyo (but,shrewdly not their Fisher subsidiary) Pioneer and (the now all but defunct) Aiwa in backing Beta. Guess which companies learnt their lesson from the Beta days (er Sony and Pioneer) and guess which companies hadn't? Quite unbelievably the main proponents of HD DVD were Toshiba, NEC and Sanyo. To paraphrase. Backing one failed consumer video format could be considered unfortunate. Backing two? That's simple carelessness.
No comments:
Post a Comment