That might not be the best analogy. The most commonly-cited reason for 
Beta losing out to VHS seems to be the initial limitation of Beta to 
1-hour tapes, which wasn't enough to record a movie from TV, or to play 
back a rented one without switching tapes partway through. By the time 
Beta increased its tape length, VHS had basically caught up from a 
quality standpoint, and its market share had reached the tipping point 
anyway.

I'm not entirely sure that TCP/IP and the other IETF RFCs became 
established because of restrictions placed on OSI. I was under the 
impression that OSI was also insanely complicated and that the IETF 
standards were much cheaper to implement from a technical standpoint. 
And, from a product standpoint, in the mid-90s, there were still a lot 
of bets being placed on closed online services like AOL, MSN, and 
Compuserve.



-William

David Fiander wrote:
> Walter,
> 
> Well the obvious commercial example, sort of is that old favourite:
> Beta (for which Sony charged a license fee and controlled who could
> produce media) vs VHS (for which there was either no fee or a much
> lower one, and not oversight of media producers).
> 
> On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 12:28 PM, Andrew
> Hankinson<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> Have a look at the ongoing battles between MPEG4 and Ogg for the browser
>> video space. I don't know of your second criteria for b), however - not many
>> people are using Ogg (yet)
>>
>> http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2009/07/06/ogg-theora-h-264-and-the-html-5-browser-squabble/
>>
>> http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/07/decoding-the-html-5-video-codec-debate.ars
>>
>> -Andrew
>>
>> On 13-Jul-09, at 12:22 PM, Walter Lewis wrote:
>>
>>> Are there any blindingly obvious examples of instances where
>>>   a) a standards group produced a standard published by a body which
>>> charged for access to it
>>> and
>>>  b) a alternative standards groups produced a competing standard that was
>>> openly accessible
>>> and the work of group a) was rendered totally irrelevant because most
>>> non-commercial work ignored it in favour of b).
>>>
>>> My instinct is to quote the battle between OSI (ISO) and TCP/IP (IETF
>>> RFCs).  Does that strike others as appropriate?
>>>
>>> Any examples closer to the library world?
>>>
>>> Walter Lewis
>