InfoMatters

When I used to teach students the classic innovation diffusion model of Rogers, I would try to bring up examples of technologies that were more meaningful to them than the agrarian and medical techniques that fill the textbook. The potato famine just doesn’t have the same resonance for non-Irish learners, I discovered. The trouble was that ideal tests of competing innovations don’t happen in the space of time that fits easily within a semester. I was reminded of all this when I learned of Toshiba announcing it was giving up on DVD HD, having been outfought by Sony with their Blue Ray technology for control of the home video market. Clearly Sony learned a thing or two from their VHS/BetaMax battle twenty years ago. Of course the issue is probably more complicated now and the influence of big sellers such as WalMart on the market battle might cause us to re-think Roger’s classic model, which postulates victory to the technology with the relative advantage, better compatibility, less complexity, trialability and observability. Or maybe not - the model is so, shall we say, flexible that it can usually accommodate all data after the fact, a point noted by my more observant students. So we could just explain WalMart’s influence on the diffusion as one of increasing say, observability or trialability, or perhaps it was Sony’s backdoor into home theatre through gaming consoles. But if this makes simple sense to you, will someone explain how we fit the observation of Microsoft’s support for DVD HD, which lest we forget, was the cheaper of the technologies, was launched earlier, and broke free of some of the region constraints that frustrate other formats, into the Rogers model without wrinkles?

All this is not new to anyone who has given thought to buying a new TV or DVD player recently - the choices are annoyingly overcomplicated and mirror an earlier ‘battle’ that petered out over the next generation sound medium, post CD. Sony pushed SACD for awhile, others pushed DVD-A, and the net result was that Sony won again, but you’d never notice since they largely gave up on the format straight after, though you can still buy hardware and software which is, to my ears, a step up from regular redbook CDs. The prediction of pundits now is that with the format war over, everyone will be buying Blue Ray but it’s just as likely it seems to me that most people won’t care and will live happily with the quality the have with existing DVDs. CD and DVD are comparatively old technologies but for many consumers this is as good as they want, and the next great challenge is not a new disk format but a whole new way of obtaining video and audio of sufficient quality without any need for disks. Of course, as there remain regular buyers and users of LP records, I can see the HD DVD being with us for some time to come. Maybe the assumptions developers are making about the human need for these new media is just a little off track? But I am sure both Toshiba and Sony would tell you they really followed a user-centered design process. I just hope for the simple time when I don’t have to buy new copies of old items made obsolete through technological ‘advances’.