Development of Products

Abstract

This chapter explains the advancement and the price decline of products based on the VCR case. After the dominant design emerges, the product advances incrementally or cumulatively because the dominant design sets a standard design of the product and a framework for the competition. Many new generation products appeared in the market with innovative functions to spur sales. Some of them became popular and others did not. In the VCR case, most consumers bought a monaural VHS machine and, then later, a HiFi VHS machine. On the other hand, most consumers did not purchase S-VHS, D-VHS, and other advanced machines because those were too expensive in comparison with their performance. As a result, the alternation of generations of the VCR occurred only once, from the monaural to the HiFi machine.