MARCH 15, 2008
I heard this dude's clever, dashing, hella' good in bed, and a stone cold player.
Technology Deathmatch
By Trevor Moorehouse
Everyone loves a good fight (assuming you’re not a middle aged woman, but we have it on good faith you aren’t), and there’s only two things that can make a fight better: ninjas and high stakes, and by high stakes we mean lives. It’s called a deathmatch, and it doesn’t always involve ninjas (unfortunately), in fact, it doesn’t even have to involve people. Presuming you haven’t been living under a rock in Portugal for the past month you know that the HD-DVD format recently lost a bitter fight against the Blu-Ray format, although our expert in-house statisticians are now predicting the impending demise of the Blu-Ray as well. In dedication to HD-DVD owners everywhere, Neenja would like to present a brief history of other technologies that have lost this brutal blood sport, and paid dearly for it.
Let’s face it, the 8 Track had a good run, it spent 15 to 20 years dominating the music market thanks to its portability and high fidelity, and some small radio stations actually still use them for identifiers and promo tapes. Unfortunately, Stereo 8’s had one glaring flaw: you couldn’t rewind or fast forward the damn things. 8 Track cassettes were set up to play in one continuous loop, so if you happened to like one particular song on an album but you didn’t really care for the other 11, you would have to sweat it out until it came on, then you wouldn’t be able to listen to it again for another 30 minutes or so. It also didn’t help that, while they were much more portable than vinyl records, they weighed about 20 times more than a cassette tape and were known to crush small children that didn’t exercise caution around them. We may or may not have made up that fact, you decide.
Fatality:
Stereo 8’s officially died in 1988 when the final cartridge was produced, and compact cassette tapes rose to glory, fame, and a crap load of money. However 8 Track tapes did get the final laugh because they never had to have The New Kids on the Block recorded on to them.
Fight:
Hey, do remember that time that Microsoft thought that they could beat the popularity of Apple’s iPod? If you do, we really don’t need to tell you who won and we don’t really need to tell you how horrible Microsoft’s Zune lost. Even worse, the iPod kneed Zune in the groin a few times, set it on fire, and killed its children. You don’t fuck with Apple.
Fatality:
The Zune is actually still around, but it’s like the koan goes, if a Zune sells in the stores, but no one buys it, does it still exist?
Fight:
The world learned an important lesson from the Atari 7800 when it was released in 1986: Don’t attempt to directly compete with a product which already dominated 90 % of the market, especially if that console happens to have Mario on its side. Using our deathmatch analogy, this is The Karate Kid Daniel Laruso vs. Jean Claude Van Damme, sure Laruso’s good, Mr. Miyagi trained him well, but Van Damme is going to land a swift windmill kick to his skull in a matter of seconds, it’s just not a fair fight. It also didn’t help that Atari failed to produce many games for the system, and they gave people an even lesser reason to purchase their product, so it was even worse, it was double amputee Daniel Laruso fighting Van Damme, and the results weren’t pretty: Atari more or less tanked thanks to the failure of their system (although the Jaguar 64 didn’t help either), and in a final analogy, it’s like Jean Claude Van Damme windmill kicking double amputee Daniel Laruso in the skull so hard Mr. Miyagi died too.
Fatality:
Atari officially announced abandonment of the Atari 7800 system in 1992, along with every other system they had ever made.
Fight:
Are you tired of browsing the Interwebs sitting comfortably in an ergonomic chair in front of a computer? Would you rather attach a confusing, clunky box to the top of your television, sit awkwardly on the floor, and browse using a device never intended to let you use the internet? Then you need WebTV. WebTv is a device you can (yes, *can*, it’s still around) hook up to your TV, hook a special keyboard up to, and then stare at your TV all day as website after website pops up saying “We’re sorry, our website doesn’t support the WebTv format.” Essentially, if you get WebTv, you pay extra for the privilege of not being able to use the internet, amazingly enough the normal computer-based method of web browsing kicked WebTv’s scrawny butt into near-bankruptcy oblivion. However, unfortunately for WebTv, Microsoft bought them before they could ascend to the great slough pit in the sky, masters of non-functionability, Microsoft attempted to make a viable market out of not using the internet just like they made a viable market out of not having a working operating system.
Fatality:
In 2001, WebTv was rebranded as MSN TV. Unfortunately for Microsoft, even if you polish a turd, rename it as something like "Invigra", and have Christian Bale heading up the ad-campaign, it's still a turd. The same goes for MSN TV, even though it's still "alive," it died years ago in our hearts.
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