That was me. I loved my APS camera, but I stopped using it a long time ago after digital cameras dropped in price so much.
Side arguments, well, aside, I don’t think you’ll find a better example than HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray; it was a battle of absolute equals decided in the marketplace. But you could write a couple of dissertations on the claimed and perceived differences and how they affected the outcome.
But the digital recorders that replaced it did every single one of these things, without the fragile special-purpose media. The mini-discs were just a digital storage medium, and replacing that with copious amounts of NVRAM represented no functional change.
I was on the other side; I got a really tricked-out 35mm zoom p&S 1997, when APS wasn’t really that available in anything but fixed-focus P&S cameras.
Then, when that was pretty much done, I went straight to a Kodak Digital camera in 2000- a DC3200. It was interesting in that it was far less feature-rich than the 35mm it replaced, but ended up getting used a LOT more, since there wasn’t any developing or extra cost involved, and people could look at the screen on the back instantly.
And… as for the Beta vs. VHS fight, that one was decided primarily by 2 things. First, people liked having longer recording times- originally Beta was a 1 hour tape, and VHS was 2, which meant that you could actually record an entire broadcast movie on 1 tape with VHS.
Second, JVC was more free with the licensing, which meant that more units could be produced by more manufacturers, driving the price per VCR down. So you basically ended up with cheaper and longer recording time (the 2 hour movie was IMO the big point there) versus slightly better quality and size. Cheap almost always wins out over quality if there’s not a huge perceived difference, and something like an inability to record an entire 2 hour movie or TV special is a BIG strike against a VCR.
… puts away long-ish post about Qwerty keyboards and Mark Twain… 
This is very misleading if you don’t explain what a kludge the spinning disk was. The years was around 1955, so the average TV was 10 or 12 inches diagonal. For a 12 inch set, you would need a spinning disk of 24 inch diameter in front of your screen. If you wanted a 48 inch screen (which, of course, didn’t exist in those days and wouldn’t today if the CBS system had won out) you would need a spinning disk of 8 foot diameter in your living room.
Yes, the color quality was quite good, much better than the competing RCA three phosphor system. But the latter was clearly going to improve with further development, while there was no way the CBC system possibly could. For two years, the FCC had the CBC system as the “official” color system. Finally, they realized it just wasn’t going anywhere and relented.
No difference? HD movies were sold in a red box. Blu Ray movies are sold in a blue box.
What’s funny is - a huge percentage of video projectors use this system today!
And the scales begin to fall from your eyes. 
<clutches chest, falls slowly and dramatically> Ah! Ya got me… <gasp>
To carry that past justifiable snark… it’s not really a mystery that most consumer products, especially major ones that will make or break a company (or at least send their stock spinning one direction or another) are 100% “designed” by marketing to ensure maximum market penetration and sales.
Clearly, the PS3 could have had an ordinary DVD drive. It would have worked just fine. It would have knocked at least some off the cost. It would have been reliable. It would have had more than enough capacity for all the games that were ever released for the box. Engineering had no need to put a BR drive in… but marketing saw an opportunity to piggyback wide penetration of the standard into high-value homes (ones that would spend $500 on a video game system, and thus were likely to buy expensive players and movie discs. It was a 100% marketing-driven decision, it was a lucky break, it was brilliant, and it was successful.
(Too bad it was Sony, is all.)
If you can’t see how that worked, and how a vast number of product “engineering” and “design” choices work because the marketing department told them to work that way, well, you are really missing a major point of why the 21st century is the way it is.
I realize that marketing is a huge force in 21st century consumerism. But I guess I’m just not cynical enough to believe that it is 100% behind every engineering decision of the last 15 years.
Wasn’t it already somewhat validated by PS2s and DVDs? Of course, there wasn’t much competition with DVDs compared to the Blu-ray HD DVD thing, and the development of DVDs was more of a collaboration than Blu-ray, but for most people I knew, PS2s were the first DVD players they owned. When I first got a PS2, I was just as interested in getting DVDs for it (The Matrix and Terminator 2 were my first) as games. And of course, Sony used CDs for their first PlayStation when Nintendo were still using cartridges (never mind Sega Saturns - no one else did). PlayStations have always used new media technology as a selling point, and they tend to get it right.
The Blu-ray/HD DVD thing doesn’t seem to be a great example, as the OP seems to be more interested in superior technologies that fail. And I’m not sure why it would be surprising that companies put features they think people will want in their products. A PS2 in a new case would have worked just fine and it would have knocked even more off the cost. All the technology would have been tried and tested. If there was “no need” for a BD drive and it was all about marketing, couldn’t you say exactly the same thing for every other PS3 feature? Why did we need better graphics, online features, HD, etc.? I was very happy with a C64. At least you could write your own programs. Now that’s technological superiority!
You can call it cynicism only if you cling to the idea that the market works on (and only on) some kind of genuine superiority. That’s so evidently and universally not true that the only thing left is reality: we buy the things we are sold, and we are sold things that will sell, not things that are better.
(Believe me, I am 152% behind the idea that this situation sucks - you have no idea unless you’ve read my postings here closely.)
But yes, major consumer goods are designed by marketing. The PS3 had a Blu-Ray drive only - *only *- because it suited Sony’s marketing plans. The handwaving and babble about how it made the box better or faster or stronger or more futuristic were just that - handwaving and nonsense. It could be argued that the PS3 was inferior because the drives (and early BR discs) were fragile and failure-prone; a plain ol’ DVD drive would have been bulletproof but boring and worth zero points in the marketing arena. Secondary to that, it was a stealth way to get a zillion BR players into homes and crush the HD-DVD competition.
Another example, from the opposite direction? The original iPhone. Go back and read the tech analyses. It did not contain a single leading-edge component - processor, memory, battery, display and comm chips were all well-proven, even slightly “elderly” choices. Apple wanted reliability and moderate production cost… but the product was promoted as being newer than next week. iPhones still fall well behind the curve in most technical respects, but the marketing has been so overwhelming and effective that most people believe they are somewhere past the bleeding edge in technical sophistication.
It’s all marketing, m’friend. Marketing all the way down. You don’t find many exceptions in mainstream consumer goods.
No. Sony didn’t invent the DVD, nor control it. Sony always comes to the market with an alternate product that is rarely superior, but for which they own and control all the production and licensing rights. They’ve lost out time and time again with this strategy (justifiably, IMVHO).
With BR, they knew full well that there was no real technological advantage over HD-DVD, and that for consumer products, a properly evolved product always offers better value than “completely new and different.” So they led the way in a battle of virtually identical products, trumpeting trivialities like larger disc capacity and blue - blue, I tell you! blue! "Martha, it turned blue! - lasers as evidence of how incredibly better BR was than clunky ol’ HD-DVD.
And then they had a stealth program to get their version into a million homes while Toshiba et al. were slowly selling players-as-players, and they scored a tremendous victory… a marketing victory, and one that was arguably at the expense of the buying public. The only good thing is that the victory is pretty pyrrhic, as disc media is at a dead end. Just maybe 4K video will kick another bump in the sales chart, since most internet connections don’t have enough bandwidth to stream or deliver that much data… yet.
This might be true in some parts of the consumer world, but video games operate a very weird zone somewhere between pure tech and art. The box itself is more or less a giant hunk of plastic. No amount of marketing can push a consumer to choose one over the other based solely on the tech that is (or isn’t) included in the hunk of plastic. The games themselves are what sell a PS3 or an Xbox 360 and they are designed by artists, much the way the film industry works.
Blu-ray versus HD-DVD didn’t have that same analog. While some studios put their weight behind one format versus the other, most supported both until the writing was on the wall for HD-DVD. But with video games, Sony has Uncharted and Microsoft has Halo and never the twain shall meet. In that way, Blu-ray was a way to make the box more important for Sony versus Microsoft’s machine. Now they’ve got Uncharted and a built-in HD movie format. That may be marketing, but it was also part of producing a “superior” machine and, as Bozuit pointed out, an attempt to reproduce the very profitable DVD capabilities of the PS2. No other system at the time included built-in DVD capability and it absolutely was a system-selling feature for the PS2.
As much as you want to compare it to Beta versus VHS, that’s just not the case here. There are other factors going on than just “marketing.”
Android versus iPhone is another good example of what I’m talking about. On the average, an iPhone and an Android are roughly comparable. But the software underneath (and the apps available) are wholly different. Pledging loyalty to one with your wallet requires more knowledge than just using one plastic hunk over another. In a way, there’s an art to it that “marketing” can’t strangle.
Okay. Gamers are completely oblivious to marketing and never buy a game, a box or so much as a t-shirt for any but the hardest and most justifiable reasons. Got it.
Informed decision making and “MARKETING!” can go hand in hand. That is all I am saying.
I wouldn’t argue. I would (and could, but won’t) make a convincing case that very few people make as “informed” a choice as they think they do. At best, most buyers of consumer products make some purchases driven by decision points other than those the marketing presents… but the number of purchases not shaped or driven by marketing are vanishingly small for the great majority of consumers.
If the PS3 had had no promotional marketing*, it’s very unlikely you or anyone you know would have bought one, no matter how much you might have rolled up your sleeves and given the spec sheet a thorough once-over.
- As opposed to pure “this product is now available” announcement marketing.
The Kodak Instamatic I had as a kid in the 1960s actually took pretty decent photos with the 126 film cartridge. I still have some negatives from that camera and have scanned them with remarkably good results.
Kodak replaced that model in the early 70s with the “Pocket Instamatic,” which used much smaller 110 film. It was wildly popular, despite the fact that the tiny negatives produced absolutely abysmal photos. Flash photos taken indoors were invariably dark, muddy, and grainy. Also, because the flash was so close to the lens, any humans in the photo had red-eye that looked like Superman’s heat vision. Terrible camera, but hey, it fit in your pocket!