The Lesser of Two Technologies

So it turns out this week that the long-drawn battle over HD-DVD and Blu-Ray High Def DVDs is over. Thank God – no more bloodshed! We can now all walk hand in hand peacefully.

Okay, maybe it wasn't that dramatic. Sony's Blu-Ray has won out, while HD-DVD will go buh-bye really quickly. Just like 8 tracks, cassettes, VHS tapes, reel-to-reels, and that old standby the phonograph, HD-DVD is quickly on its way to Obsoleteville.

Meanwhile, thousands of people are now cursing their soon-to-be-worthless High Def player.

The Gressel household recently bought a big screen HD TV, but we purposely held off buying a High Def DVD player. I really didn't want to be the guinea pig of which technology would win out, no matter how much the salesman tried to convince us that both formats would be around for a long, long time. (Liar.) Whether or not I now run out and pick up a Blu-Ray player is yet to be seen (probably not), but overall I've been pretty lucky in avoiding the soon-to-be-useless technology:

* My first VCR was VHS, and not the cheaper Betamax.
* I bought a CD burner and not a ZIP drive.
* As a kid I wanted a Laser Disk player; thankfully I could never afford one.

True - I did have a Walkman for my new wave cassettes, but who didn't? It was the 80's – everybody had either a boom box on their shoulder or a Walkman in their ear. (I had both.) It's certainly nothing compared to today's iPods, but it was what we had at the time, and I got a lot of use out of that old tape player.

The sad part is that technology changes really quickly, and the window of opportunity for something to be a hit or not is really short. Back when I started working in the computer industry newer and faster processors came out every month. CD-Rom drive speeds went from 4X to 48X in a matter of a year. (Why can't go much faster than that? It's 'cause the CDs tend to shatter at speeds higher than about 50X. Now you know.) Memory module speeds seemed to double overnight.

We used to figure that your computer will go from being the latest technology to a doorstop in 18 months. But sure enough, there was always some yahoo who had to rush out and buy "the latest and the greatest" every time, even though he only used his computer for Solitaire and user group porn. Remember P.T. Barnum's adage about suckers being born every minute?

So the question remains: are you willing to pay the premium price for untested products that may be worthless in 6 months? Apparently someone is. I'm not.

When (not "if") technology does spin laps around you, well – at least then it'll be your decision to do something about it. Example? I've got all 45 of Walt Disney's animated classic films from 1937 – 1999 lined up on a shelf in my basement (in chronological order, of course). It's an impressive collection.

The only hitch is that I no longer own a VCR, so I have no way to play them. So one of these days I'll have to go pick up a $25 VCR from Wally-World and have it on hand in the event I have a craving to watch "Make Mine Music" again.

Still, they look damn good all lined up neatly on my shelf. And fortunately they're not stacked next to an iCube, an Atari 2600, or a suitcase-sized cell phone.