From: Alex Young <alex@...>
Date: 2007-03-29T23:36:22+09:00
Subject: Re: Just for fun...

Chad Perrin wrote:
> 2. Certain compression programs are very well known, and "everyone" has
> them (for some definition of "everyone", depending on OS platform, et
> cetera).  Thus, "everyone" uses them.  Short of producing a hugely
> popular program that handles both old and new compression algorithms (or
> both old and new file formats, in other examples of this phenomenon in
> action), adoption of something new is going to be very slow and prone to
> failure despite any technical advantages to the new algorithm/format.
> This is illustrated by the demonstration of the commercial end-user
> market failure of the Betamax -- VHS won that little skirmish simply
> because it was more widely available, quickly became a household word,
> and prevented migration to Betamax simply by way of market inertia.

This needn't be the end of the story.  For example, WinZip 5 (if I 
remember correctly) didn't handle tar.gz files.  Modern WinZip does.  I 
think it also handles tar.bz2 files.  I wouldn't be at all surprised if 
the next version handled .7zs.

-- 
Alex