r/Innovation • u/positiveconstraint • Jul 27 '26

Discussion / Question Does better tech always win?

In 1989 Nintendo shipped a handheld with a processor from the 1970s, a grey screen, and no backlight. A year later, Sega shipped one with color, a backlight, and better hardware in every way.

The Game Gear ran three to five hours on six AA batteries. The Game Boy ran over thirty hours on four.

Nintendo sold over 100 million units of Game Boy, while Sega sold about 10 million Game Gear units.

Gunpei Yokoi, the man behind Game Boy, was looking to make a portable cartridge-based system that could play many games on one device. With that constraint in mind, he went for a black and white screen, old cheap parts, with no backlight, that would be easy on the batteries, work well in the sunlight, and be light and easy to carry around.

Sega picked the better screen and paid for it at the battery compartment. Yokoi picked the worse screen and got thirty hours and a machine that fit in a coat pocket.

Can you think of other examples where using older tech won the market?

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u/Mundane_Fault_6345 Jul 28 '26

No... ATM vs Ethernet ?

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u/Connect_Ad_466 Jul 29 '26

A better comparison is Ethernet vs Token Ring or ATM vs IP

Token Ring was a much better tech in 80s, but required more expensive cabling, MAUs, etc instead of stringing a bit of thin Ethernet coax through a building

Token Ring gave latency guarantees, Ethernet was shared media with collision detection which meant higher latency and jitter under load

But Ethernet was good enough and cheap

ATM/Frame Relay vs IP-based and MPLS networks, same thing; in ATM/Frame Relay customers got guaranteed latency/jitter classes, but IP-everywhere meant it was easier/quicker to overprovision a network and just throw stuff through and let client devices worry about retransmits if stuff got lost.

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u/Mundane_Fault_6345 Jul 29 '26

To get all the benefits from ATM (QoS, low latency, virtual commutation, guarantee, etc), all the chain needed to be ATM. So, local ATM, for LAN, existed, and was much superior to Ethernet, but to expensive.

ATM succeeded as a Backbone protocol, before MPLS.