Quote:
Originally Posted by ack_bak
It takes both (ie the industry and consumers). But I don't know how you could not step into a Best Buy, Circuit City, Walmart, etc in 1999-2002 and not see what the retailers, studios, and CE's were doing. DVD was placed in the best real estate spots in the store and VHS was treated like the bastard step child. This was planned and calculated.
Yes, most consumers loved the idea of no longer having to rewind movies, and they liked the form factor and additional features that DVD offered, but clearly consumers were also pushed to upgrade as well.
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I think "forced" is the wrong word, it's just, it gets to a point, where a newer technology becomes just as financially viable as an older one, making the older technology completely redundant.
Look at Hard Drives, Microsoft initially chose 8gb HDDs for the Xbox, but as the consoles life progressed, suddenly 20gb HDDs were cheaper to buy, than 8gb HDDs as those were the ones made en masse and 8gb HDDs became "specialist" components.
A similar situation may occur with DVD vs Blu-ray. Blu-ray hardware manufacturing will drop to the point by which, it is as cheap to make, as just a DVD drive (I believe this has already happened with CD drives vs DVD drives?) and so making a DVD only player will be utterly pointless. This will eventually lead to Blu-ray players being the only optical media players on the market (barring a new optical format being released). We've already got that case with HDTVs. It is impossible to buy an SD set in most stores in the UK now (if not all of them) because the HD resolution panels are mass produced so much, that through scales of economy. they're cheaper than SD displays to produce.
Why would you make an older product, if it costs the same (or even just a slightly higher price) to make the new standard?