Daily Archives: October 23, 2005

Apropos Harriet Miers’s nomination to the Supreme Court…

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… this from Martin Kettle, writing in yesterday’s Guardian:

Back in the dawn of American constitutional history, Alexander Hamilton set out the reasons why it was important to have the Senate act as a check on presidential nominations of this kind. The Senate, he wrote, needs to make a president “both ashamed and afraid to bring forward, for the most distinguished or lucrative stations, candidates who had no other merit than that of coming from the same state to which he particularly belonged, or of being in some way or other personally allied to him, or of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of his pleasure.”

Earlier in the week, Bush was asked: “Of all the people in the United States you had to choose from, is Harriet Miers the most qualified to serve on the supreme court?”. The president answered “Yes”.

The new Betamax problem

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This morning’s Observer column.

History repeats itself, said Marx, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

Step forward the consumer electronics industry. In the late 1970s, two incompatible video recording systems emerged: Betamax, from Sony; and VHS, from JVC. The battle between them became one of the canonical case studies in the curriculums of business schools, illustrating the victory of marketing over technology, a moral deeply comforting to sales executives and those who teach marketing.

Although the Betamax format was technically superior, VHS won the battle for the hearts and pockets of consumers. It is thus seen as a cautionary tale for smart-ass engineers who think technical sweetness is all that matters.

As ever, reality is slightly more complicated than marketing myth….