Sony Discontinues Betamax Cassette Production

(11/10/2015) Most people (including me) may not know Sony's Betamax cassette still exist, but this news just posts its epitaph. Sony's Betamax was a revolutionary video recording technology that is considered superior in term of video quality than rival VHS technology. Because Sony insisted Betamax to be sold exclusively by Sony, their rival united together and supported another standard -- VHS -- and eventually toppled Betamax's dominance in video cassette market. One amazing part is that, when the rest of the world has let go Betamax long time ago, Japan is still very nostalgia towards Betamax.

Japan is a very unique market in technology. It has its own ecology, regulation and standards. As a result, the technology's catchup in Japan's market often follows a different path. For example, fax machine sales is still 'relatively strong' in Japan compared to most developed countries in the world. Seeing from the perspective market development, Japan is almost like a " Galápagos Archipelago" compared to the rest of the developed countries. The Betamax production is just an example. Those once big Japanese technology companies worked so hard to please their native consumers (Japanese), they totally missed the bigger market outside of Japan. In this aspect the cellular phone market is another example (NYT news). Washington Post has a good report on this aspect. Will Japan lead the next big wave of technology innovation like Internet in the U.S. in the 1990's? I doubt it.