Word: betamax
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...most businesses being first to market grants a lead not easily forfeited. McDonald's, Coke and Hertz debuted years before Burger King, Pepsi and Avis, and have held on. In the high-tech world, however, the opposite appears to obtain: early products such as Betamax and Macintosh were steamrollered by latecomers that waited for markets to mature and newer technologies to develop...
...synergy" between Sony's core business, producing "hardware" such as VCRS and camcorders, and Hollywood's "software" -- movies. Owning a studio, Sony thought, would help give the company the clout to set the industry standard for the next generation of digital video technology. In the early 1980s Sony's Betamax format of analog videotapes lost out to VHS, so Sony was determined not be left behind again. But Sony's strategy turned out to be a mistake when the industry agreed last year to an open standard that no single company could monopolize...
After doing time with Betamax on technology's skid row, the CD's first cousin is enjoying a sales boom...
...forward looking. The company has never had Sony's cosmopolitan polish, yet it was Matsushita's subsidiary JVC that developed the original VHS video technology in 1976. Tanii, then the youthful chief of Matsushita's fledgling VCR division, convinced his superiors that consumers would choose VHS over Sony's Betamax if they could also buy compatible videotaped entertainment...
Where does the Sony decision leave the 20 million U.S. owners of Betamax machines? Most likely on the road to that vast consumer-electronics graveyard where orphaned home computers and other gadgets go. Though Sony says it will not stop producing Beta machines or tapes, industry experts are skeptical about the format's prospects. Says Makoto Tamaki, an electronics analyst at the Industrial Bank of Japan: "Someone who is going to buy a new recorder is likely to choose a VHS. There is the anxiety that Sony might stop making Beta...