RE Sony/VHS/Stick
Sam, Sony learned a lot since the Betamax, which failed mainly because VHS could store more
Allow me to disagree. Betamax failed because the VHS folks were astute enough to corner the rental market early on, which meant that a virtuous circle developed. More people noting more VHS tapes for rental which induced them to buy VHS machines which encouraged the rental stores to concentrate on VHS for their limited shelf-space.
Whether stick fails or succeeds will have little to do with its attributes, including storage capacity and speed, because they are much too late into the market. CF is likely to win because it has the critical mass of design-ins, and also a growing base of users who upon buying their second camera, and later, MP3 player, will stick with the machines that can use the CF cards they already spent big bucks on.
The next thing to displace CF will have to have a big advantage in terms of capacity, price or ubiquity (ie it can be used in many devices). Maybe the new memory technology coming out of a university in the UK, which is 2 years away according to the inventors (which makes it 5 in reality?) will be that, but I doubt it will be Sonys stick.
Joe |
