Tom-
I’m now a cheerleader for Google+ for the simple reason that I think it’s significantly superior to Facebook. I suspect Facebook will survive, much like how broadcast TV has survived cable TV. Then again, look at the massive rise and fall of MySpace.
– Matt Crowley
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Hi Matt:
As a complete FB "amateur", I have little choice but to sit back and watch this mighty battle unfold through my sociologist’s filter.
And that promises to be a rather fascinating, if perverse, exercise!
Thanks for your prescient advocacy, sir. It was via your posts of last week that I first encountered the term "Google +".
– Tom Kipp
P.S. My own fear is that–as with Beta vs. VHS, Mac vs. Windows, analog vs. digital recording, and vinyl LPs vs. the avenging angels who brought forth the cd and then rigged the game–the technically "inferior" format might well emerge victorious, without adequate consideration of the wants or needs of the audience, and with just as little recourse for said audience, in the end. Certainly the "Art for Art’s Sake" argument seldom carries the day in our hyper-Capitalist environment.
As a computer illiterate, I’ve always wondered about the Linux argument, which has appealed to me on a theoretical level whenever I’ve read the long pieces in THE NEW YORKER and elsewhere about "open-source" software. My sense of TV is that the networks [like our biggest banks] were/are "too big to fail", while our brief-lived, undercapitalized, informational and social media instruments seem to have no comparable "insulation" from being rapidly destroyed, or at least severely ghetto-ized [cf. Napster, Limewire, CDNow, Friendster, MySpace, Pandora, et al.]. Even when they might arguably have notable advantages over those that render them "so last year", to deploy Parry Tallmadge’s very charming, circa-1983 phrase!
I pray for the fate of Wikipedia, should some evil giant simply decide to run them off the superhighway. Perhaps that’s no longer possible, given Wiki’s head start and excellent PR. But I wouldn’t bet that YouTube is yet beyond such malign intervention.
By the by, I suspect there’s a MONSTER bestselling book in all this, at least once the social media "revolution" finally shakes out all the way! Any takers?
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Tom, the reason why VHS won out over Beta is because people didn’t want to buy two players. G+ is free.
– Cory Davis
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No ma’am, the reason VHS eventually won out is that the various American entertainment and electronics corporations were envious of/pissed at Sony for scooping them by several years and locking up the home video market with a superior product, and so conspired to create a clunkier, incompatible format to compete with Beta and used every foul, protectionist trick available to win the war, including selling their shite players for slightly less than the excellent Beta players then on the market.
The public never knew what it was missing until it was far too late. But for at least four or five years after the Sony Betamax’s 1976 debut, it was generally the ONLY brand of home video player/recorder one could purchase.
The aforementioned Yanks simply didn’t want to pay Sony anyroyalties, so undertook the "divide and conquer" strategy that permanently disfigured the video marketplace.
In each instance I cited in my postscript below, the superior, predecessor technology is listed first, the evil interloper/corporate Trojan Horse second! So it would have been VHS players that would have been folks’ SECOND home video purchases, not Beta. Of course "market penetration" was relatively glacial in those pre-internet days, so it took home video [in whatever format] a good decade [1976-86] to reach the same percentage of American households that dvd reached inside of 18 months during the late-Nineties!
But NO ONE ever claimed that VHS [or even the subsequent "Super VHS"!] was the technical equal of even the earliest Beta machines. They were the equivalent of Wal-Mart, choking to death well-run, beloved small businesses in every town in America until their heinous big block monster stores were virtually all that remained.
By the by, video professionals continued to use Beta almost exclusively right up until digital video emerged, so those who cared about quality were quite clear in their preference! And if video players had somehow been free, as social networking sort of is [one does require certain machinery, reliable electricity, and internet connectivity in order to participate, after all], then noinformed consumer would have chosen VHS.
But then so few consumers ARE informed, thus the very real chance that Facebook will find a way to vanquish its brand new and apparently superior rival.
It’s a sad, if thoroughly emblematic, Modern American Story, repeating endlessly in subtly different variations, and we’re all a little poorer for the ways in which it played out and for the lessons Corporate America gleaned from it.
– Tom Kipp
For more on the late Harvey L. Schein, go here.
