It was very nice of Megan to link to me yesterday (even if the commenters that came along with it proved to be huge pains in the ass). So I hope I won’t seem ungrateful if I take issue with this post about Blu-Ray’s eventual triumph over HD-DVD.
Megan’s right that I and a lot of my fellow nerds aren’t very happy about this outcome, but she’s wrong to say that “[e]very time there’s a format war, the losers complain that the inferior product won through nefarious methods.” I’m not sure that’s a fair characterization. In this case I can admit that Blu-Ray is the technically superior standard. Many technologists didn’t like it because it seemed a bit more DRM-laden, because it didn’t seem worth the price premium, and because Sony has behaved very badly with respect to proprietary media formats in the past (Redbook/CD excepted, but of course that was a joint venture with Philips). I should say that I don’t really have a dog in this fight — I don’t own a drive from either camp, and tend to think that we’ll only get halfway through this generation of tech before network delivery of video consigns Blu-Ray to a CD-like role (except less useful due to the aforementioned DRM). But that doesn’t mean I’m happy with the way things turned out for HD-DVD.
It’s not so much that I think there were dirty tricks involved (although there may have been). It’s just that it’s frustratingly obvious that the factors determining a technology’s success frequently have little to do with its capabilities, price, performance or other innate attributes. Rather, they’re the result of quirks of the business environment into which the technology is born.
The Reason article that Megan links to irks me much more than her own post, as it consistently fails to understand this. “MS-DOS wasn’t an inferior technology that succeeded because of the market landscape and consumers’ path dependence,” it says (more or less). “It’s just that the licensing environment surrounding IBM PC clones made them cheap, and once consumers started using DOS the costs involved in switching made doing so impractical. So you see, it was the superior technology after all.”
The article does this again and again, most egregiously in the case of Dvorak vs. QWERTY*, where the author desperately tries to establish that actually in all cases the market selects for the optimum technology, always and in perpetuity throughout the universe. I know, I know — if you’re a home-row typist you’re probably laughing so hard right now that your pinky fell right off the semicolon key. But the argument proceeds anyway, tirelessly pointing out that geek-favored technologies have some downsides, maligned market winners have some upsides, and the way the path-dependent public ultimately chose is proof that the winning tech trumps the former on the merits.
Well, if you define “the merits” as “the sum of all factors facing the public” then yes, that’s true. But this amounts to merely asserting that we live in an at least semi-rational universe, which isn’t a very useful or original conclusion. The fact is that in many cases it would be better if those factors were weighted differently. As things stand, they’re generally configured to serve the interests of the businessmen at the beginning of the process more than the consumers at the end of it, and that’s a shame.
I suppose I shouldn’t get too upset; this is just a variant on the Libertarian tendency to perpetually declare ours the best of all possible worlds (except for the parts they don’t like). But it’s still frustrating to read stuff like that Reason article. You just know that the author doesn’t use a command line.
* Special bonus sophistry: pointing out methodological errors in pro-Dvorak studies, then buttressing the point with pro-QWERTY studies… full of methodological errors. Unless you really think it’s fair to compare the marginal benefit of training to a group of experienced QWERTY typists and newly-trained Dvorak typists.