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.