Is It Time to Retire the old VHS/Betamax Analogy?

Any time two (or more) technologies start to battle it out in the marketplace, pundits and analysts will feel compelled to trot out old analogies about VHS vs. Betamax (or even recent ones like Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD) as they look at how the marketplace will determine “winners”.  And for good reason: “Winner takes all” has often been the standard modus operandi in technology market battles.

But I think we’ve begun to reach an era where comfortable (or at least not too uncomfortable) coexistence of competing technologies is becoming more the norm – and when companies have begun to see that there’s money in the “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” approach.

The mobile market is, unsurprisingly, a long time leader here – even as GSM and CMDA fought it out on the carrier level, handset manufacturers began offering multi-mode/multi-band “world” phones that simply worked, wherever they were used. We’re even seeing quad-mode phones on the market now.  Cool.

The “evolution” towards LTE is bringing this into sharper focus, as carriers on both sides of the divide are planning to move their high speed data services to LTE, and even Qualcomm is including UMTS and LTE in its chipset product lines. 

I think that the handset example is instructive here – because the last thing that the user (remember them?) of the handset wants to worry about is what network is available where they are. 

I saw a couple of other examples of this trend this week, in the area of home control and automation (which is certainly increasingly important to broadband providers).

First was the announcement that the Z-Wave Alliance (one of the two big, competing home control protocol providers, along with the folks behind ZigBee) would be providing products that interfaced with Control4’s home control systems (previously ZigBee only).  It’s a great announcement for Control4, because it solidifies their move to be the operating system of the home. But this kind of announcement is huge in the home control space overall too, simply because the historical lack of a universal standard for things such as lighting controls, home entertainment control and energy management has left this market fragmented and stuck in the realm of hobbyists and high-end customers willing to pay for custom integration. If the top end of the food chain (be it handsets in mobile, or home controllers in this market) can mediate between competing protocols and technologies like this, the fragmentation is no longer really a problem.

Which brings me to the second release – by the Home Gateway Initiative, a global group of telcos and vendors designing the next generation of (naturally) home gateway devices – announced the adoption of a modular approach to home gateways, allowing the easy addition of new services and interfaces to a home gateway.

As I mentioned earlier, I think that getting deeper into the home – reaching across home networks and to individual devices – is going to become increasingly important to broadband service providers who move through and beyond IPTV and to offer new services like energy management and Smart Grid initiatives.  In this world, where more and more consumer devices interact with the broadband network, the ability to move beyond technology “turf wars” is going to be incredibly important. A carrier is not going to be able to dictate to customers (who want it all to “just work”) things like home control protocols. Instead, flexibility is going to be the hallmark of success here. 

Today, you really can’t be wedded to one side or another of a Beta/VHS battle. You need to design around – and expect – a diversified set of devices interacting with your network, and you need to be able to handle that. The good news is that your vendors seem to be moving in that direction. The standards bodies are too. It’s nice to know that we’re starting to learn from our prior mistakes, and that the market can still decide which technology is best, just not so much so that it holds up deployment of technology in the first place.

Agree? Disagree? Let me know with comments or email at dbriere@telechoice.com. And if you’re going to Supercomm this October, come by the ATIS Technology Conference, where I’m demoing a lot of the latest emerging technologies and services that will impact the IPTV business case, and moderating the whole ATIS IPTV track, and let me know in person.