Betamax was not better than VHS

There is a frequently-told story in the tech and marketing industries about the "format war" between Betamax (Sony's video recorder technology, based on the systems used for broadcast), and the alternative from Matsushita/JVC, Video Home System (VHS). This happened back in the late 1970s, but it has passed into lore and so still gets brought up in lots of conversations and conference presentations.The story goes that VHS won the format war for video recorders in spite of Betamax being technologically superior. This is true *only* for a narrow and marginal set of performance claims that were largely irrelevant to consumers.In the US, early Betamax units could only record one hour of video. A film is around two hours, one of their games of ‘football’, more like four hours. The supposed quality advantage over VHS? 250 lines of resolution versus 240, plus a few other metrics 90% of consumers would never understand. All available in a better-built unit, but at a much higher price.This is not what technologically superiority looks like to me. It’s a total failure to understand the customer.VHS, by contrast, could record two hours from day one, and this was very quickly extended to four hours by RCA, whose people understood what the American customer wanted. By the time the format war came to Europe, the volumes of VHS recorders being produced for the US market meant the price could be lowered further.VHS didn’t win because of the porn industry (one story) or because of better marketing campaigns (the most common story). These factors may have contributed to its ultimate success. But mostly it won because it was the technologically superior product in the ways that actually mattered to the customer.

How smart does a vacuum cleaner need to be?

With my gadget-man hat on, I had a demo this week of the most spectacular vacuum cleaner. It arrived in an array of cases with multiple components and a trained demonstrator to walk me through it.

This is not the Rolls Royce of vacuum cleaners. That would imply conspicuous expenditure. This is more a boy scout in a BMW: beautifully engineered and prepared for anything.I’ll be writing up a full review of the Vorwerk VK200 over on The Loadout, but what struck me most about this system was its smarts. This is a highly intelligent vacuum cleaner.

Smarts in action

This was made clear at two points in the demonstration, one deliberate, one less so.The first occasion was in showing the transitions from carpet to hard floor. The cleaner head has ultrasonic sensors to not just detect this transition but to understand how deep the carpet might be and adjust the suction and profile accordingly.Impressive.The second occasion was when the unit started misbehaving. I felt for the demonstrator, having been in that situation. It’s uncomfortable. But I didn’t read too much into it: these are products with a 17–25 year lifespan. The worst is bound to happen in a demonstration.What surprised me was his response. Not “I’ll have to fix that,” but “I’ll have to reprogram that.” This is a vacuum cleaner smart enough to be fixable by plugging in a USB cable.

Ubiquity

The processing power required to support such capabilities is hardly spectacular by modern standards. But nonetheless it struck me that yet another formerly dumb item is now smart. Not just because it has a small digital brain but because it can sense its environment and respond.When you’re looking to the future, one of the critical things to understand is just how far and how fast the price or technology falls, and its accessibility increases. The more widely used and deployed a technology becomes (often a factor of price), the more shared knowledge there is about how to deploy it. This drives further application and the price falls again, continuing the cycle.The result is that we see technology in all sorts of applications where previously it may have seemed unrealistically expensive or complex to implement. Sometimes that’s frivolous — the WiFi Kettle being a good example — and sometimes that smarts is put to good use, as in the VK200.This ubiquitous application of technology — in all its forms — drives competition, often from unforeseen sources. People with a problem recognise a technology-driven solution and see that it can be constructed with relative ease. They then launch themselves into a market that may have seen little new competition in decades.Unless your peripheral vision is alert to incoming technologies and the challenges they might carry, your business is at serious risk.

In the future (carrying) less is more

There are four things I hate carrying around: wallet, house keys, cash, laptop. They just add friction to your day, discomfort to your pockets, and weight to your backpack. I'm working to do away with all of them.

Wap your wad

The wallet and the cash are increasingly easy, as long as you don’t care about loyalty card points. I'm willing to ditch those in favour of a nice empty pocket, even without the privacy concerns. For most of this week I have been relying on my phone for payments and have found few occasions when it has not been accepted.

I have tried tucking a credit card and a single cash note into my jeans for those occasions but found the credit card gets easily bent. A little engineering along the lines of the Ridge wallet may be required.

Unlock your pockets

The keys are more complicated. Yes, there are digital locks, like the Yale lock I tested recently, which I will be fitting to the door of my workshop (when I get around to fitting a door to my workshop). But this would annoy the crap out of the rest of my family as a front door control.

Instead I need a system where I can use my phone (or RFID) while they continue to use a key. I haven’t yet found one fits my front door, and I don’t really fancy replacing the door just yet.

Leave the laptop

The laptop is perhaps the biggest challenge. I'm lucky to have a pretty dinky laptop but it’s still the biggest and heaviest item I have to carry each day.

Until now I've always believed that mobile devices lack the horsepower for a lot of my work, but I now think it is only the interface that stops me getting everything done with a pocket sized device. And I mean that in every sense: even if I can type fast enough on screen — as I'm doing now — I don’t have the screen size or mouse-driven precision for video or audio editing, or presentation prep.

Lots of attempts have been made to overcome these challenges with hybrid devices and accessories. But, of course, the more additional hardware it involves, the more you may as well carry a laptop. This will require experimentation…

In the future…

So far this has just been a post about my pet peeves. But there is a point to it: this stuff all goes away, and soon.

The first step will be further consolidation into the smartphone as it increasingly integrates all of the major wallet functions — not just payments but smart cards, loyalty schemes, and ID.

Then it will start to absorb the key chain. Right now, digital locks are a pain: power is a problem, people are concerned about security, and there’s no straight electronic replacement for barrel locks and security doors — without changing the door. But all of these problems will be solved in time.

Where it gets really interesting is when these functions start to explode out of the phone and either become device-less, or integrated elsewhere.

The first place people think of for this integration is the body, but given the fast pace of technology change, I remain sceptical about anything embedded under the skin. Rather, I think we’ll see schemes that replace the device altogether: biometric sensors for identification could go a long way to replacing keys and cards. Maybe a single, small, ID device could provide a second authentication factor.

Likewise with computing power: why take it with us when the power can be hosted in the cloud and projected to us when we need it? Future devices might only need a minuscule physical presence if they can capture voice input, or project three dimensional interfaces through augmented reality. Even the AR device may only be the size of a contact lens.

A minimalist future

We may be on the path towards a minimalist future already: most media items are disappearing — discs, newspapers, magazines. We may be buying more books for now but how many people do you see out listening to, watching or reading from their digital devices rather than a dedicated physical medium?

The convergence of devices into the smartphone is already cliché, but it hasn't finished until it has swallowed the wallet and the key chain. I still believe we will see an explosion of functions out of the smartphone as more ergonomic options become economically viable. But long term, those devices may be so small, that we don’t even remember we’re carrying them. Or, there may be no device at all.