Examples of technically superior products that lost out to worse, more popular products

Sega Master System vs Nintendo Entertainment System.

Well, not to poop on your meme, but there are some arguments to be made that VHS was *not* inferior to Betamax (e.g., it offered the longer recording lengths that were actually important to people). That being said... From what I understand, the Amiga computers were extremely advanced and capable of many things that others could match only years later. Yet only a few diehards use them today. A similar (and no doubt flamewar-inspiring) argument could be made about the Apple Macintosh, I suppose.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/10/8/134958/152

And I still believe Beta is used within the television industry extensively (may be less now, I don't know). As far as end user consumer... Divx and DVD, almost destroyed Circuit City. ZIP drives to CD -- outside design professionals people had ZIP drives for only a few years max before CD-Rs won out. IE and Netscape -- Not the current incarnation, but IE definitely won that battle. Of course you can't really compare such things. It's not like the money theory which states that if there are two currencies in a market, the weaker won will win out (people end up saving the higher valued currency, actually using the lower valued one). Very rarely do you have a market segment made up of generics, a commodity market -- at least in the tech consumer world. What boils down to costumers it that they want choice and they want low prices. VHS was made by a ton of companies, IRC Beta, like all of Sony's goods, was strictly controlled. Sure VHS looks like crap on even a mid-priced non-HD set today, but when it came out everything looked like crap on those sets, the difference was nominal to most consumers. Divx also lost out because users don't like being restricted, they want choice -- IE was a truly better product and MS monopolized that into existence.

WordPerfect lost out to Word and wasn't there a better thing than Excel a long time ago?

Lotus 1-2-3, amberglow? Oh, and WordPerfect lost out to Word because they http://weblogs.asp.net/chris_pratley/archive/2004/04/27/120944.aspx (read about it from the horse's mouth). I'd say Cray Microsystems in geneal, and Seymour Cray in particular might be a good example. Cray was an engineering genius -- he developed the first all-transistor computer, built the first Ghz. clock processor -- but more than that, his computer designs were beautiful. He basically invented RISC processing. Unfortunately, as many geniuses, he liked to go solo (almost all the designs up to the Cray-4 were his own).

Betamax is the format that lost to VHS, while the Beta format is used in the tv industry, AFAIK.

Betacam's days for the TV industry are pretty much dead. I believe Sony announced officially a year or two ago that they were stopping production by.... 2006 or something. I forget, but it's done. Minidisc never took off outside of Europe, AFAIK, so it's hard to say it beat DCC (though DCC flopped big time). Laserdisc never took off but DVD did even though (to my knowledge) LD sported a better picture and sound... but you had to flip it as each side only held an hour or so and they were 12". You could argue VHS beat out LD, though. What about that Tucker car. Didn't the regular car industry stomp it even though it was better than what they were producing? Windows over Mac.

Minidisc made it big in Japan. It was basically the U.S. that didn't really pick it up.