🚀 go-pugleaf

johnston@me.udel.edu (Bill Johnston) writes:
>My understanding is that the patentable part involves a rewritable
>CD format, and the hardware differences needed...
...
>The photographer may send a couple of rolls of film to be developed 
>and printed as 300 meg to a Photo-CD CD ROM.  Later on, the photographer 
>may send another roll of film along with the CD back to Kodak for another
>few hundred meg of prints.
...
>My bet is that CD media will become cheap enough that rewriting
>will not be seen as a major advantage compared to the hassle of
>trying to convert the marketplace over to a new, incompatible
>hardware standard...

Seems like a bad bet to me.

Think just for a moment what Kodak's current business is.

They deal in "consumables"--stuff you buy and use.  Whether that's good or
bad, they probably have a very good understanding of such markets.

The important part is not that you can take one CD and have them add stuff
to it vs having one CD per roll of film.  It's that you can have fewer CDs
if they can add to it.  You carry around one object vs 3 or 4.  It doesn't
matter whether CD media are cheap.

Organizing the data is a hard problem.  If you have some control over that
at the physical level, you're ahead.
-- 
Dick Dunn    rcd@raven.eklektix.com   -or-   raven!rcd    Boulder, Colorado
				Cats!