Obsolescence: Difference between revisions

There was a time, in my lifetime, readers, where there was no realistic way of personally storing television content. This changed in the early nineteen-seventies with the release of the personal video cassette recorder (VCR). Philips released on in 1972, then in 1975 Sony released the “Betamax” format. This was quickly followed by JVC, which launched a competing “VHS” format. The rivalry between VHS and Betamax was so fierce it even has its own [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war Wikipedia article].  

To cut a long story short, after ten years toe-to-toe, and notwithstanding that Betamax was of allegedly better quality, VHS won.<ref>Some claim VHS due to its greater stock of pornographic movies. This is doubtful, but still an awesome theory.</ref>

What is instructive for our purposes is what happened to all those loyal Betamax customers. Okay, they were stuck with a machine that was finally useless, and they needed to toss it out buy a new VHS one. But you upgrade your video player every few years anyway, right? The real bummer was that ''your stock of movies was useless too''. All that money spent on Betamax tapes — the large part of that value being the implied license to watch the film that owing a tape bestows — was wasted. You had to start again.<ref>The episode presents interesting philosophical tensions between the ideas of “[[tangible property]]” and “[[intellectual property]]”, but they’re not especially relevant here — and they don’t really present in the networked digital world where the model has switched from “owning a physical thing with some intellectual property rights built into it” to buying a licence to consume [[intellectual property]], where the delivery mechanism (the Netflix app, say) is free, and the [[substrate]] over which you consume it (your device) is neutral.</ref>

Unlike [[use-case obsolescence]], [[competitive obsolesce]] leaves you with a significant tail risk — that all your investment in the platform to meet a particular use-case is wasted, and has to be recreated on a different platform should that other platform win out. This risk is such that users will be highly resistant to investing in your platform in the first place — the earlier stage you are at, the more resistance there will be.  

Design challenge therefore: ''how to create a platform that is as immune as possible to competitive obsolescence''. The JC’s best guess at a theory: ''don’t compete''. Give your platform away. Make it as open architecture as possible so that ''users'' can develop it in any way they, at the time, see fit. Make it interoperable, too, so that if it turns out now to be the platform that wins the war, you, and your users, can quickly transfer to the platform which does (which, we assume, will be even more interoperable than your is — otherwise, how did it win?)