Quarter-sized CD's?

Anonymous Coward writes: "The Denver Post is running an interesting story about Dataplay, Inc. This Boulder, Colorado based company aims to supplant the 20-year-old CD with a quarter-sized (1.5" x 1.25") optical disc that can hold 500 Mb of data. Players and media (already supported by 4 major record labels) are scheduled to launched 'the latter part of first quarter 2002'." They're cute, but considering that Sony's minidiscs never took off and this format is heavily restricted, my guess is that this will fail.

Comments

Minidiscs never took off?

[chrysalis]

I disagree. Minidiscs took off. It took a long time, but nowadays, many people own a minidisc. Pre-recorded MD never took off. Ok. Probably because they were as expensive as CDs, and because record dealers didn't want to have every record on a new support. But blank MDs are nice. Excellent quality, all features of a CD (direct access to tracks), plus song and disk titles. Plus they are small. The only bad thing about MD is that recorders are still a bit expensive. But I only use MDs to record music I want to hear while traveling. I don't want of CDs and MP3/OGG gadgets that need a computer to be recorded.

It'll die

[Dolly_Llama]

Please forgive the marketroid speak but,

Any new format, to succeed needs to add value to the user to overcome the cost of changing over. With CDs, there was a marked increase of quality over vinyl. Some might argue it was a decrease, but Joe Sixpack is still glad his CDs dont pop and scratch. Further, the CD allowed instant track access at the push of a button. It was these two features which pushed the changeover to CDs, along with the gradually decreasing price of players and concurrent larger selection of CDs in stores.

That said, where are the additional values of this medium over CDs? It's small. neat. But if I have to give up my CD burner, small dont mean much.

The next medium is most likely to be some flavor of mp3 or ogg device, be it solid state or magnetic disc based. Give me the ability to carry all the music I've bought over the last 15 years in my pocket, and the ability to navigate easily among all the songs, and I'll be all over it.

Precedent

[fm6]

"Add value" is more than marketroidspeak. It's something you have to think about whenever you introduce a new technology. Examples:

• 8mm video cassettes. Small, better video quality. But not good enough to make anybody switch from VHS.
• Every PDA ever invented, from the ancient WorkSlate to the latest "smart" phones. The idea isn't bad in itself, and there have even been a few successes. But there still isn't enough "added value" to make most people switch from paper-inscription technology.
• Spreadsheet software. The vendors have changed, but everybody still uses the klunky old macro language designed two decades ago for VisiCalc. Not even Microsoft could get people to accept a more elegant spreadsheet language.
• Desktop software. Yeah, I'd rather be using KDE or GNOME or even JavaStation. Anything but MS bloatware. But how to convince everybody to give up their Word/Excel/Powerpoint skill base?
• QWERTY keyboards. Yes, they're inefficient. (Although the inefficiency didn't actually come from a deliberate attempt to slow the machine down.) But who's going to learn typing from scratch?