In the 70’s Quadraphonic sound was tried, but never really caught on and went away.
In the 80’s came Surround sound and it’s been with us to this day.
For decades the video phone was tried and failed.
Video conferencing for businesses has been around for a while now. And for the consumer market things like Skype aren’t that old, but video chatting on computers, while not huge, is much more successful than video phones.
So what other technology pairs are there where one fails and a very similar one succeeds?
I think cost is a big factor here. Older “video phone” technology was very costly, for example one version involved closed circuit television cameras at both ends, not at all cheap and not really accessible to the average consumer. Nowadays, the typical laptop computer has a half decent camera built in, if you don’t have one adding one is minimal compared to the cost of the computer you already have, and you don’t even have to purchase and install a specialty program (I’ve been using Google chat lately myself). This makes it far more affordable. Granted, the quality isn’t perfect but it’s good enough for the average video call and that’s really 90% of what makes it successful.
I disagree - a true helicopter can hover and perform a genuine vertical take-off or landing which a gyrocopter can not. I think the greater utility of those two is why the helicopter has been more successful.
To add to what Broomstick said about videophones, never mind that the cost of video camera was trivial, it was the cost to use it that killed it. A typical long distance called cost $1 a minute, 3 minute minimum and the bandwidth required for video was orders of magnitude larger than for voice. Now, on Skype, the cost is 0. Makes a difference.
There’s a critical difference between the two, though. John D. MacDonald put it best with quad sound: “I have never wanted to stand in the middle of a group of musicians. I want to be over here, with them over there.” Quad was also never used for movies, although there are several predecessors to “surround sound.”
Surround sound is used only for movies, although a few enterprising studios that didn’t get the lesson of quad release music mixed for 5.1.
It’s the same general idea, but put to very different uses. I think many cases listed so far are the same. There aren’t many instances of Technology B succeeding in exactly the same space as failed Technology A.
What most people failed to understand about this “battle” was that the material was identical on both discs - minor codec differences etc. aside, there was no technical advantage or even much difference between the two. Only the physical substrate was different. BR won because it came out of the gate promising larger disc sizes (which HD-DVD was capable of, with evolution)… and practical use hasn’t yet reached the limits of the original spec. Marketing controls how much crap is shoveled on each release. HD-DVD incorporated the feature of live-connection additions, which BR very quickly absorbed as the hideous “BD LIve” function. No differences other than name and hardware encoding… and IMVHO the wrong one won for the wrong reasons.
Only because it was accessible to video hacking, especially the bottom end doing things like pirating movies on CD-ROM substrate. It had almost no advantages for the commercial world.
quad sound was best done with a quality quad source. a good reel tape machine or cassette deck was an added new cost. people were tending for smaller hardware at the nonaudiophile level, which conflicted.
picture phones were costly and needed costly coaxial cable. there could have been performance limitations which could have lessened transmission costs with higher phone costs.
Blu-Ray won because of a combination of payoffs and Sony including it with every PS3 sold. Had the X-Box originally come with an HD-DVD player built into the machine, it might have been a closer battle.
I remember that. Having to pay each time you wanted to watch a disk you bought seemed monumentally stupid. I can’t believe they even tried it.
Well yeah, that’s why I said similar. For example, there was consumer quadrophonic sound and there is consumer surround sound. Video phone manufacturers tried to create a consumer market for video chat. Webcam manufacturers succeeded.
Philips developed the car CD system-but never was successful 9they never solved the vibration/skip problem). They developed a competing technology in the 1990s-called “DCC”. It was a digitally coded cassette sound system, and it was very robust. Sound quality was very good.
It was a massive flop-Philips lost over $2 billion on it.:smack:
Helicopters are very impractical machines – except when they’re not. They’re not fast, they don’t go far, they don’t carry as much payload as an airplane with the same power, and they’re more expensive to buy and maintain. But there are times when you must have VTOL capability, and that’s what they do best. An autogyro is neither fish nor fowl. Many can ‘jump’ into the air, and with the right winds they can be VTOL. Since they are always in autorotation, engine failures are not as critical as in a helicopter. They lack the full capabilities of helicopters, and also the practicality of fixed-wing aircraft.
And there was DAT (Digital Audio Tape) too, but they both lost because record companies insisted on putting copy protection on both which limited if, and how many times you could copy songs. Seeing how with analog tapes and eventually CD-Rs where you could record what you want, how many times you want it, it’s no wonder neither succeeded.
