Sony's Obsession with Proprietary Formats

geoffrobinson writes "Jonathan Last, writing for a lay audience in the Philadelphia Inquirer, comments on Sony's push for the Blu-ray format: 'Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. One of life's more satisfying ironies, however, is that the same fate often befalls those who fixate on history... ...Obsessed with owning proprietary formats, Sony keeps picking fights. It keeps losing. And yet it keeps coming back for more, convinced that all it needs to do is push a bigger stack of chips to the center of the table.'"

BLU-RAY

[Anonymous Coward]

But Blu-Ray sounds cool.

CD's Successors

[Comboman]

No kidding. I'd say their biggest failure by far was that horrible compact disc experiment. What ever happened to that, anyways?

It was made obsolete by Sony's other great experiments like Digital Audio Tape (DAT) [wikipedia.org], MiniDisc (MD) [wikipedia.org], Super Audio CD (SACD) [wikipedia.org] and of course RootKit Enabled CD (RECD) [wikipedia.org].

I've got good news and bad news..

[Anonymous Meoward]

To: Howard Stringer, CEO, Sony Corporation

From: Djinns'R'Us, Wish Granting Department

Re: Recent requests after bottle opening

Dear Mr. Stringer,

We are pleased to announce that we have fulfilled your latest request: to make Sony "the next Apple". Although we had to steal resources from projects in our Monkey's Paw Department, we have managed to complete this task up to your specifications.

We hope you enjoy the restructuring. Sony now resembles Apple, circa 1996.

Sincerely,

Re:By name alone I have a feeling blu-ray will die

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Someone like my mother will go buy a new television - HDTV. She'll upgrade her cable box to HDTV.

Bet you $20 that she'll still have them hooked together with a composite cable, though.

Re:Technologically superior?

[Anonymous Coward]

> here was no way to use MD as portable storage until long after the iPod had arrived

You are totally clueless! Sony had portable MD-data recorders over 10 years ago, in the early 90'ies! I owned one myself back in 1995. It had SCSI-II interface and was the size of a regular cassette Walkman. It played regular MD-audio recordings, and could be used as portable storage with 140 MB pr MiniDisc.

It cost 1495 NOK (about $250), which was almost $100 cheaper than the more popular ZIP drive (with a lousy 100 MB storage). Oh well, it served me well for serveral years - until I got myself a cd-burner.