Philips is a great
Dutch electrics and electronics manufacturer. They invented
revolutionary devices like the
audio cassette and the
compact disc, which both were and still are huge commercial successes. But Philips is also responsible for immense
fiascos.
I'll try to sum up three of them.
The first failure was a
commercial one : the
V2000 videotape standard. This was the first
VCR my father bought back in
1984. Although the video quality was superior to the concurrents,
Beta and
VHS, it suffered from the fact that it was double sided, making it impossible to record a film longer than 120 minutes without flipping the tape, thus rendering programmed recording pointless. There were also issues with tape fragility, as explained in the
V2000 node. I remember it was impossible to rent a V2000 movie. By
1987 we were forced to switch to
VHS.
The next commercial failure was the
CDi in the beginning of the 19
90s, where 'i' stands for
interactive. The intertactivity basically meant the user could flip pages on multimedia
CD-ROMS. The few titles that were developed sucked seriously. The next year, they introduced a full motion video module, which gave the possibility to view
VCDs. A VCD is an ancestor of the DVD, encoded in
MPEG 1. Few titles were released, the quality was less than VHS, for twice the price, without the possibility to record. VCD were basically only successful in
China.
A third failure was the
DCC - Digital Compact Casette. The DCC was released within months of the release of
Sony's
minidisc (Before or after, doesn't matter) in fall
1992. It was basically a crippled version of the
DAT, which was used -- and still is -- in professional environment. They claimed their main advantage on
MDs was the fact that is was
backwards compatible with analog cassettes, but this is not the case as you couldn't record them. Probably a
dual heads solution would have been possible for
backward compatibility. The worst drawback on using cassettes instead of discs is that it took ages to reach a particular track. By
1996 DCC was officially abandoned. I was happy : my worst enemy had bought one. With a fraction of the
R&D costs, Philips could have promoted DAT and made it cheaper to manufacture.
source:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~jacg/dcc-faq.html