Retiring VHS vs. Betamax

Any time two (or more) technologies battle it out in the marketplace, pundits feel compelled to trot out the old VHS vs. Betamax analogy, as they look at how the marketplace will determine “winners.” And for good reason: “Winner takes all” has often been the modus operandi in technology market battles.

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

The mobile market is, not surprisingly, a long-time leader here — even as GSM and CDMA fought it out on the carrier level, handset manufacturers began offering multimode/multiband phones that simply worked wherever they were used. We're even seeing quad-mode phones on the market now. Cool.

The “evolution” towards long-term evolution (LTE) is bringing this into sharper focus, as carriers on both sides are planning to move their high-speed data services to LTE. Even Qualcomm is including UMTS and LTE in its chipset product lines.

I think the handset example is instructive here because the last thing the user 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 increasingly important to broadband providers.

First was the announcement that the Z-Wave Alliance (one of the two competing home control protocol providers, along with the folks behind ZigBee) would be providing products that interface 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.

This announcement is huge in the home control space overall because the lack of a universal standard for things such as lighting controls, home entertainment control and energy management has left the market fragmented, 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, then fragmentation is no longer really a problem.

Another example is the Home Gateway Initiative, a global group of telcos and vendors, which announced the adoption of a modular approach to home gateways, allowing the easy addition of new services and interfaces.

Getting deeper into the home is becoming increasingly important to broadband service providers. In this world, where more and more consumer devices interact with the broadband network, the ability to move beyond technology “turf wars” will be important. A carrier is not going to be able to dictate to customers about things like home control protocols. Instead, flexibility will be the hallmark of success.

Today, service providers really can't be wedded to one side or the other of the Beta/VHS battle. They need to design around — and expect — a diversified set of devices interacting with their networks, and they need to be able to handle that. The good news is that equipment 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 that it holds up deployment of technology in the first place.