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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 >