[LINK] Re: Netscape going the way of Betamax

[Ralph Seberry]

On Tuesday, 07 Nov 2000 at 01:06, Robin Whittle wrote:
> (Beta was a superior approach to 1/2" videocassettes, developed by Sony,
> with the heads at differing azimuths to use the tape 100% without guard
> bands, and therefore using a longer, narrower, scan for each head, with
> resultant increase in horizontal resolution.  VHS was a crappy
> alternative with an unreasonably large cassette.  VHS was produced by
> more companies, and being good-enough, was bought by the masses.  It
> eventually became the "standard" and now even Sony makes VHS VCRs.)

In the long list of products that lost out to Microsoft,
Netscape doesn't deserve comparison with Beta. Sure, 
Netscape and IE brought out versions tit for tat, and
Netscape was slightly better, but Netscape had the
same creeping featuritis that Microsoft is blamed for,
and it wasn't superior to IE in the way Opera is.

Netscape's failure to get a relatively bug-free release
out to compete with IE5 harkens back to the failure of
Lotus, and of Borland, to keep competing. And to the
late release of a windows version of Wordperfect.

And IMHO, the best comparison to Beta is OS/2 losing out
to windows 95 (which was only in early beta at the time.)