It was an excellent format that is still around.
You're kidding me right? Not only was MD an abysmal format for what it was marketed as, it was terrible because of exactly the kind of cartoonishly-evil format restrictions that get Sony routinely bashed on here! If you were going to white-knight a Sony media format, you definitely should have picked a better one. MD was marketed primarily as a _recording_ medium, a cheaper replacement for DAT. But the content division wanted it to also be used for distribution, god only knows why (really, who in their right mind would pay more money for a bulkier (thicker) CD just for the plastic case, a fact the market made clear). So even though it was ostensibly for recording, they made it as difficult as possible to actually _get_ the audio you recorded onto your computer!
As another poster mentioned, you couldnt just rip the disk onto your computer, you had to trans-code (Hopefully you had one of those oh-so-ubiquitous optical spdif port on your sound card. MD computer drives were never allowed to be made). Granted, this was a digital transfer so there was no loss in quality, but you still had to sit it there in front of your computer for an hour re-recording the thing like a freaking cassette tape. Much later, they introduced a proprietary, windows-only software program that would transfer the disk to an audio file faster than 'real time' (i.e. like a freaking cdr that everyone was used to at that point). Never used it, always had mac or linux, but I heard it was awful. Keep in mind that this was all to prevent people from ripping commercial MD releases, making this flabbergasting piece of anti-technology in a 'recording' medium one of the worst and most salient examples of Sony's chronic double-think in their consumer electronics division that has led to market failure after market failure for Sony formats.
MD was simply a cash-grab with a garbage proprietary format that noone wanted, and a textbook case of Sony's content division crippling their electronics division. I should have coughed up a little more money and gotten a DAT machine, at least that format is still around, better quality, and more convenient than MD, even though its ~10 years older.