I was recently shopping at
BestBuy with my wife, Kirsten. She's close to the opposite end of the tech-geek
spectrum as I am (she uses a computer every day, but mostly for useful things
and is not particularly concerned about some of the religious debates around
technology and the relative merits of one thing vs. the other. She's not going
to be running out to buy an iPhone as soon as it launches (I likely will
be).
I'm currently in the market
for a new DVD player at home. I'm generally not big on DVDs as I find the whole
notion of moving data bits around using atoms organized into shiny disks someone
quaint. My parents are visiting us from India, and there are some things they
want to watch that are not "in the cloud" somehwere -- only on DVD. But I
digress.
So, we are in the market
for a DVD player. I've been following the HD / DVD Blu-Ray debate for a while --
primarily as a curious bystander, because it didn't really affect me all that
much -- until now. As I was walking down the DVD player aile in the store with
Kirsten, she paused and pointed to one and said "why not just buy this one".
(It was an HD DVD player). I asked her why that particular one had caught her
eye. Her response: "Well, it's an HD DVD player. Aren't you all over that
whole HD thing?" She basically thought HD DVD was what connected to our HDTV
and that was that. The whole notion of Blu-Ray with all it's technical merits
never crossed her mind. It just made sense to her that an HD DVD went along
with an HD TV. In her mind, Blu-Ray wasn't even in the race. Decision
made.
So, my question is this:
Of the thousands of mere mortals (i.e. not tech-geeks) that will make the DVD
player buying decision in the coming months and years, how many times will this
story repeat itself? How many people will walk out the door with an HD
DVD player simply because they think it's the "natural" choice"? How many of
these decisions will it take for HD DVD to become the prevailing standard not on
technical merit, but just because of the name? If we think back to the VHS vs.
BetaMax debate, I find a bit of similarity. VHS (when people asked) stood for
"Video Home System". BetaMax didn't stand for anything. Will history repeat
itself?
What do you think? How
important is a simple name in helpling customers make a
decision?