Philip Greenspun has a few ideas on the decline of the CD. He reasons (in his own unique style) that people don't buy CDs because young people pay too much for rent in Boston. (Yep, that must be it.)
Lurking in his usual baseless assumptions is an interesting observation:
The CD celebrates its 21st anniversary this year, having been introduced in Japan in 1982.ÃÂ It is tough to milk $billions in profitsÃÂ from a 21-year-old product that has never been improved, especially in a First World economy where things like digital cable TV are developed and marketed.ÃÂ We really should give the record company executives credit for being grandly ambitious....There's something to be said for longevity, backwards compatability and forwards compatability. But there's also the fact that pretty much everything in the music industry has changed in the last 21 years -- except the CD and it's antiquated distribution channels.
Maybe that's why we're not buying as much as RIAA thinks we should...
My 1989 386 had, what I thought at the time to be, a HUGE 100MB drive. I managed mini-computers with maybe 300MB on-line. I had a DEC VMS workstation that had And, maybe they were. I know that new ADC/DAC chips sprung up to cheaply read 1x CDs.
Similarly, 10MB Ethernet in the early 80s was just a huge fat pipe. To even use this big pipe, huge buffering interfaces had to be developed.
Maybe the reasons these two technologies have lasted is because they pushed the envelope of what was possible at the time. In the case of Ethernet, 100MB has become a pretty minimal "standard" now, but CDs are pretty much exactly the same as they've always been. Well, the readers are faster.
I wonder why they felt they had to make a big jump in technologies to go to DVD? Why didn't we see compatible 2x,4x,8x, etc. recording modes on CDs a long time ago? I understand that they designed exactly this kind of thing into DVD and you see a lot of different densities out there already for them.
