Jasen Betts wrote in a message to Tom Walker:

 JB> Hi Tom.

 JB> 07-May-04 11:58:50, Tom Walker wrote to Andy Ball

 TW> too ->  Here in the U.S. millions (or perhaps billions) of dollars
 TW> are being wasted -> building overlapping, incompatible networks.

 TW> Not necessarily. goverment Regualted Standards are Rarely Better.
 TW> The Competition of the War though typicaly is GOOD for the
 TW> Customer. Look at the Piched Battle between the Beta and VHS tape
 TW> standard/ We the Customer came away Far better off.

 JB> The way I heard it Betamax was technically superior to VHS.
 JB> how did the customer benefit?

It was,  and the tapes were smaller too.  Ultimately the customer
benefitted by having a lot of mfrs of the machines out there in the market,
 which was much harder to do with Betamax because as I understand it,  it
had a much more restrictive licensing setup.

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