Most of the example 'failures' you reference are the products themselves, and not their underlying technology. In almost every case, the better tech does win, or is eventually superseded by something even better than that.

For example, the underlying Laserdisc technology did prevail (through CDs and eventually DVDs), though the Laserdisc format did not catch on due to practical limitations that made it inferior to other options at the time. The superior image quality of Laserdisc was largely unrealized on consumer TV displays, coupled with the fact that users were unable to record onto the disk. But this is still an example of the better tech winning, as optical disk formats have since dominated in consumer media storage.

Even the VHS/Betamax example is terrible, because although Betamax lost the consumer videotape format war, it survived successfully as a professional and commercial video format.