Knowledge Snippets on Sales & Marketing

I had written earlier a post on the war on standards. Recently this topic is was again in news . A recent news on Toshiba's corporation announcement that Toshiba will stop making HD DVD players and recorders is going to have a major impact on media industry. So we see history being repeated again this time we see sony has learned from its mistakes from Betamax launch. So what are the implications and what are the lessons learned?

One and most important I understand it is not about the product but about the market.
So a good product is may an essential attribute for success but it not the only factor. Success in war of standards is about the holistic perspective, it is about product, it is about market, it is about market intermediaries and it is about partnerships.

HD DVD format in spite of promising lower transition cost and backward compatibility lost out !!! Why ? Was it because of capacity shortcomings as compared to Blue Ray or was it something more. I think it was nothing related to capacity or transition cost. If you  have a look on
the media market and how it is evolving. I see a clear pattern in terms of customers types and choices. There will be consumers who will be more of experiencing type and there will be others who can will be ready to compromise on this, if divide the consumers broadly in terms of  media experience preferences. The latter has choice of different medium including internet download and old DVD players etc. These are consumers who look for a value in deals, when Toshiba planned to target these by bringing its standards directly to consumers with electronics goods at better price and compatibility, it forgot to see they have alternative channels as well.
Sony on another hand tried to influence the market intermediaries like picture studios, DVD rentals and Supermarkets understood early that these intermediaries are going to play a major role in influencing the consumers which are experiencing types. These customers are ready to pay more for that experience which is good news for Picture Studios, Super Markets and Manufacturers. Blue-Ray does require new manufacturing set up and hence the costs are going to initially be higher but eventually will go down. So Toshiba failed to understand the fresh start gives chance for all intermediaries to iron out those copyright issues, politics etc.  Blue-ray also started early and had a bigger camp with bigger stakeholders like Samsung, HP, Panasonic etc and it was marketed very well in terms of technical superiority. It was able to make a point that blue-ray discs are offer more storage, expandability and durability.

Some other important lessons your partners may have their own agenda, like Microsoft wanted to promote its own Video codecs was better off in this war as Sony opnened it standards for Microsoft. So Microsoft was able to use this HD-DVD platform to get the VC-1 writtern in sony standards along with ISO formats which it failed few years back when Sun Microsystems, IBM, Oracle backed Quicktime.

As I see one customers are not going to rush buying blure-ray discs or player either. The market of next gen DVDs as prefered medium for HD content is still to evolve as earlier discussed. Much depends on how the non-disc medium evolves. It also depends on content, pricing, ease of use, availabilty. Then there are issues related to DRM for transfer of content to other machines as PC's, Consolesm, laptops and may in handhelds.