This was slightly painful to read.

Betamax failed for basically one reason.

predatory licensing.

This is the same reason that minidisc players failed, that Sony's MemoryStick line was never picked up by any product manufacturers except Sony and media reader makers, and _almost_ became a CD failure. Philips managed to strongarm Sony on CD's to force a common standard without predatory licensing - thus, CD's came out fast and stayed. (Sony has never learned from these failures. They just keep trying)

VHS became the standard because the adult movie industry (the largest independent consumer/producers of movies at the time) refused to cough up the fees that Sony wanted for -EVERY SINGLE TAPE-. VHS, on the other hand, was an open standard - because that's what JVC (the creators - not Panasonic aka Matsushita) believed in.

Personally, I'd rather have HD-DVD than Blu-Ray, for the exact same reason. IBM learned its lesson after the MCA architecture fiasco, and decided it was more important to get its standards out there than making a fortune off of every example made. Blu-Ray _solely_ "won" because WalMart agreed to only carry Blu-Ray (probably for a bigger kickback). As the largest retailer of movies, that put the kibosh on HD-DVD. Quality wise, there was no tangible difference between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.

As for the repeated "Why doesn't the US suck on the European Tit for standards?", it's simple. Most of the time the original commercial product was developed in the US, and the US already had something that worked (These were often started/invented in Europe, but Europeans can be insanely conservative for new developments - let someone else take the risk). Europe (or a country therein) would then skip the 10 year development/growing pains period, grab the end product, and build on what would seem like a logical set of standards.

It's not that easy to set aside the infrastructure that's already been paid for, in order to go to something new. If you've never had _anything_, it's easy to skip the steps. Look at all the countries that went basically from no telecommunications to cellular networks. They did it because it's much easier to build the towers than run telephone wiring everywhere. Other places with heavy fibre layouts? When they decided to wire places for the first time in 70 years, why _not_ just put in whatever the newest, most durable standard might be? (Yes, you can cut it, but fibre doesn't suffer from corrosion)

For the US, here's the _rough_ development of telephones.

Telegraph - developed in several places in Europe and America between the last 1700's and 1830's. However, due to issues, Europe didn't use it for much than short distances (other than England, who used it for the rails)

1837 - Samuel Morse and his assistant, Vail, developed Morse code and the telegraph system we think of today. By less than 10 years later, the US had linked up all of their major East Coast cities _and_ by 1861, had linked east to west coast. That's 24 years. In Europe, other than England, they hadn't even connected major cities. (England switched to Morse code by 1851)

Telex? Invented in Germany, but spread mostly in other countries. Undersea cables? Britain. What did France do? Developed a code that was used by everyone else for a while to speed up transmission.

Radio? _not_ Marconi. Tesla (American immigrant). Marconi just commercialized it, and tried to claim it as his own - Tesla won the court cases by proving that Marconi was present at the lectures Tesla gave on the theory.

Telephone? That's AT&T in the original American Telephone & Telegraph (aka Bell Telephone Company in its original form)

http://www.greatachievements.org/?id=3625 (calendar from 1900 on). Note that most of the major improvements are either US/Canada/Britain, or US only.

Early telephones were like the rails (developed predominantly in Britian) - interconnectivity and compatibility was like early cellular - they just couldn't work with each other. One town's telephone system might or might not be able to talk to the next town. Thus was born the monopoly - which during the development and spreading process was arguably more beneficial than detrimental. The downside was that they didn't see the point in replacing older stuff with newer stuff that quickly. It took 10 years+ for the touch tone phone to actually go from final product to release to the public. There are even still telephone Central Offices (buildings scattered around towns and cities that centralize areas) that are packed with rotary and panel switching equipment, rather than having been replaced with digital switches. (Weirdly enough, the "Rotary System" was used predominantly in Europe, and the "Panel System" was used predominantly in the US/Canada - but both were developed by AT&T subsidiaries. )

In any case, the US went from wired telephone with crank and switchboard, to rotary phones with switchboard and more automated systems, to touch tone phones, then the explosion of the digital phone era from deregulation, then the advent of analog cellular (anyone remember GTE Mobilenet?), pager systems, the switch to digital cellular (NexTel/iDEN, CDMA, TDMA, GSM), Europe (probably due to wars more than anything else) skipped big chunks of the development/infrastructure steps. For example, most of Europe has GSM systems - because it was mandated by law in 1987. CDMA was a Qualcomm development. Arguably, CDMA systems are often much more advanced, but GSM is cheaper and more widespread due to licensing costs (see the above about Beta and VHS)

Also, keep in mind the relative sizes. What's the joke? "In America, 100 years is a long time, in Europe, 100 miles is a long way" The US, as a single country, is about the size of Europe. (3.9 million square miles for Europe, 3.8 million square miles for the US). That means that developments in _one_ country can have what seems to Europeans to have an inordinate impact. Perhaps if Europeans thought of the US as being 50 countries in a Union, it might be easier for them to conceive of relative impact. The US "Countries" tend to do things together, thinking themselves part of a common group. The European "Countries" think of themselves as distinctly different entities, and most of them have some sort of long standing dislike for each other. ("You invaded my country four hundred years ago!" "Your country didn't _exist_ four hundred years ago!") (Germany, for example, is younger than the United States. It didn't exist until it was hammered together from the countries known as 'the Germanies' in 1871. Poland is probably the oldest European country that has a relatively unbroken governmental structure. England (not the UK!) also has a very old continuous line of governance)

Am I upset about it? Nope. Someone has to foot the bill for the development, and the US/Canada/Britian triumvirate has been the most able to bear the costs of that development. Various Europeans kicked off the start of a lot of it - they just couldn't get people to cough up to take it beyond that start.

US/Japan is similar. The US has developed a LOT of things, but frequently it was the Japanese that then took that item built for a single purpose, engineered it to be smaller, and pushed it out to the commercial market. No reason to get upset with Japan for making it smaller/faster/better. (Think about the old joke about Japanese Transistor Radios)