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Originally posted by: Gillean
I think it was called... ummm... 'DVD'.
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oh the format that came out of a wide collaboration that included toshiba, sony, warner bros and others, and ended up being a great success without the need for an optical rom format war? a collaboration that was largely the result of sony and philips abandoning the high density cd they'd been developing? sony and philips weren't too thrilled with the number of patents they held in the dvd format, thus their marketing of the "+R" & "+RW" formats, break from the dvd forum's high-def project & attempt to lure warren lieberfarb away from it, and development of blu-ray.
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Originally posted by: Gillean
Is there any previous examples of a technology winning marketshare over its competition due to, or simply with, its name being similar to the previous generation's tech?
i can think of a couple of game consoles that succeeded largely on name-recognition, i guess. gameboy color, which beat the pants off of a number of superior handheld machines (sega gamegear, atari lynx, neogeo pocket). that was probably a combination of brand recognition, backwards compatibility with the monochrome gameboy titles, and nintendo's infamous bullying tactics toward game developers & retailers at the time.
playstation 2 launched with games of arguably worse quality than the slightly older sega dreamcast, it was a near-endlessly difficult platform to develop games upon, and was continually beaten by ms xbox & nintendo gamecube in terms of visual quality... but a combo of brand recognition & sheer amount of games available kept it well ahead of those other systems in sales. now that playstation's so completely dominant, on one hand nintendo's become satisfied to preside over a profitable niche, while on the other hand microsoft have willfully thrown quite a large amount of money into xbox long after its apparent market failure 'cause they seemingly believed it'd be worthwhile in the long run to establish the brand if it means having a chance at eventually winning the brand recognition game.
also, i'm fairly certain? that intel's pentium brand continued to outsell amd's athlons at times when athlon chips were clearly matching and even surpassing pentium 4 chips on the bang-for-the-buck scale. that seemed to have a lot to do with name recognition of "sequel" products.