From: "Jac Goudsmit" To: "DCC-L discussion list" Subject: One minute of silence please Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 10:25:23 +0100 This is a translation of an article on the frontpage of today's "Eindhovens Dagblad" (a local newspaper, their Dutch web site is http://www.dse.nl/ed) this morning. All copyrights are acknowledged. Comments by me are in square brackets. (By the way Philips will probably also put it on their web site at the press releases page (http://www-eu.philips.com/news/) but they usually take a day or 5 to do that for some reason...) This is the article: Successor of cassette failed: Philips stops production of DCC (by Gijs Moes) EINDHOVEN - Philips has taken the digital compact cassette (DCC) out of production. DCC will only be made for professional applications. For the Japanese market, Philips are releasing a MiniDisc player in the near future. [see also this article: http://www.hip.atr.co.jp/~eaw/minidisc/eindhovens_dagblad.html - JG] A spokeswoman for the company acknowledged this yesterday. "We are still delivering the product, but we aren't making it in large quantities anymore". Last month, Matsushita, known from the Panasonic and Technics brands, announced that they would stop with DCC. Philips announced earlier that they would release a couple of new models around this time. At the introduction, four years ago, Philips had high expectations about its own invention. DCC was going to be the successor of the ever successful cassette. Every year, around 2,500,000,000 tapes and 200 million players are sold. DCC had to compete against Sony's MiniDisc system right from the start. In Europe, that system didn't become a success, but in the Far East, MiniDisc is very popular. Philips is going to produce it for the Japanese market as well. The hardware will be sold under the Marantz name. In february this year, Jan Timmer who was President of Philips at the time, admitted that sales of DCC were below expectations. According to him, it had become a "niche product for audiophiles". Timmer made clear that it would not be kept in production at any price: "We have to make the balance sometime: how much did it cost, what does it bring in and what are we doing with it now". [Yes, Philips have proven once again that they can ruin a fine product that is better than the competition (or at least was; with the new compression techniques, MiniDisc has improved a lot and MD and DCC audio quality is now about equal) and cheaper too, just by bad marketing. They did it before with Video 2000 and a number of other good ideas, and they'll probably do it again. What's next? The flat screen TV prototype they had on the "E-Motion" fair in Amsterdam recently was clearly better than the ones that the competition showed. That will probably be next to go. Around these areas (the home area of Philips) they aren't NEARLY as popular as they were. It used to be: if you buy a Philips product, it's always good (that used to be their slogan for some time). Now even Philips employees must be more inclined to go for a Sony, even if they can buy Philips products much cheaper in special stores meant for them. The slogan now is: "Let's make things better". It seems they mean "better than nothing". It may be true that the quality of the products are better than they used to be, or better than the competitor's, but in any case it's not "Let's SELL things better" -JG] ============================================================================ Jac Goudsmit CD-i & PC Software Engineer Codim Interactive Media CV Eindhoven, The Netherlands http://www.codim.nl jac@codim.nl jacg@xs4all.nl All unsollicited commercial E-mails to the above addresses will not be read beyond the subject line and will be bounced to your postmaster. ============================================================================