"Sony obviously hasn't learned any lessons from the failure of minidisc, atrac, memory sticks, r-dat, sdds, HiFD, 8mm video, SACD, UMF, etc, etc (I'm sure I've missed a few failed sony formats)."
Maybe some of these aren't popular in the US of A and Europe? (never been there, so i have no clue). But I can tell you for certain that minidiscs were no failure in Japan my friend! Everybody and their mother had a minidisc player back in the day. Any decent home stereo system will have minidisc built in or no one will buy it because everyone has a stack of recorded MDs laying around with their favorite music from the last 10 years or more. (Over here people regularly RENT music and record it to MDs or more recently just rip to MP3/M4A/WMA, encode to SD music formats, encode to ATRAC even depending on their mobile music device choice... a system that does not exsist in Japan. BTW, video game rental does NOT exsist in Japan... which might be a factor for why video game systems make a better profit here and why so many smaller scale games can be published here.)
Memory sticks may only be used in Sony products... but a hell of a lot of people use Sony products over here. And almost every family has a sony Hi8 camcorder laying around (thats no longer used of course) and a majority have a Hi8 deck or combination Hi8/VCR that they would use not only for recording the camcorder videos to standard VHS, but also just for recording their favorite tv-shows or rented VHS tapes to Hi8 tapes.
I think sony understands the dynamics of the consumer market in Japan very well... ...they just need to think about the world wide market a little better.
I can see this "TransferJet" being something that would work great in Japan. Why would you have a peripheral device 3 meters away anyway? For most poeple here, thats the next guys apartment! 3cm is a safe distance... its more secure, i would imagine it's more battery efficient too? (haven't read the specs)
Perhaps Sony is just giving its Japanese consumers (and probably South Koreans too) another choice that will fit their lifestyles and culture better?
