Betamax vs VHS. A Case Study of the Competitive Battle of Video Cassette Recording Systems

Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject Business economics - Miscellaneous grade: A University of Southern Denmark language: English abstract: In 1975 Sony introduced into the market the Betamax video cassette recorder (VCR). This has been the main actor of an interesting competitive battle in the consumer electronics industry. In detail this industry was at its early stage and standards were not defined yet. Apparently Sony built a valid and good strategy that was supposed to win the standard war against its main competitor VHS a VCR provided by Matsushita. However Matsushita performed a different strategy that have lead it as winner (Raynor 2007).Even if Sony's strategy was well-built Sony lost this standard war due to other unpredictable factors such as market and technological uncertainties. This paper aims to analyze these factors in detail with a complementary identification of the rationale beyond Sony's strategic choices and a consequential identification of the strategic choices that it would have done differently. Furthermore rationale beyond Matsushita's strategic choices will be studied as well and the competitive battle will be analyzed also from the technology point of view.Hence it's interesting to observe how these two firms have adopted so different strategies in alignment with the firm corporate strategy and how they focused in different product attributes. So the outcome of this paper will be understandings of the insight of Sony's strategy in relation to relevant literature.