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Sony Admits MP3 Error
inflex writes "In a rare show admission of taking a wrong turn, Sony's officials have admitted that their stance on MP3 players was wrong." While this was pretty obvious to anyone who has ever shopped for a portable MP3 player, it is nice to see Sony admit their shortcoming. Ken Kutaragi puts it best when he says, "We're growing up," and with any luck future devices won't be crippled with silly formats no one uses.
It's nice that they finally admitted it but, in another context, they still have to get rid of DVD Region encoding otherwise it's only rethoric.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
"We're growing up," and with any luck future devices won't be crippled with silly formats no one uses.
:(
why did the end quotes have to be there
Sony admits MP3 error
Yuri Kageyama in Tokyo
January 21, 2005
SONY missed out on potential sales from MP3 players and other gadgets because it was overly proprietary about music and entertainment content, the head of the company's video-game unit said.
Ken Kutaragi, president of Sony Computer Entertainment, said he and other Sony employees had been frustrated for years with management's reluctance to introduce products like Apple's iPod, mainly because the Sony had music and movie units that were worried about content rights.
But Sony's divisions were finally beginning to work together and share a common agenda, Mr Kutaragi said at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Tokyo.
"It's just starting," he said. "We are growing up."
Sony officials have rarely publicly said the company's proprietary stance was mistaken.
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Mr Kutaragi, who has long been viewed as a candidate to lead Sony, was unusually direct in acknowledging Sony had made an error.
Sony's music players did not initially support MP3 files and only played Sony's own Atrac format.
Sony's technology innovation had been "diluted", Mr Kutaragi said
"We have to concentrate on our original nature - challenging and creating," he said.
Once the powerhouse of global electronics, with success exemplified by its Walkman, Sony has lost some of its glamour lately, losing out in profitability and market share to cheaper Asian rivals.
Mr Kutaragi - known as the "Father of the PlayStation" for making the game machine a pillar of Sony's business - said the new PSP, or PlayStation Portable, handheld will grow into a global platform for enjoying music and movies as well as games.
The Associated Press
give consumers what consumers want, not what you want consumers to want (to make the most money)
If I had to do it all over again, I would never have bought that MiniDisc player.
This sounds nice and all, but it is a move Sony only would have taken if they make more money out of it.
DVD region encoding, the Blueray/HD DVD wars (as they did with Betamax/VHS) and other issues where they are more bull headed will go on... until they jump the train where they will once again make more money.
It is all part of normal business, but do not for a moment think Sony has changed.
Alright, Sony, now let's talk about this Memory Stick...
What's your damage, Heather?
I hope it was choosing MP3 instead of the superior Xiphophorus Helleri Ogg Vorbis sound format. I am really sick of that unpronounceable "MP3"--seriously, what were they thinking?
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
"...and with any luck future devices won't be crippled with silly formats no one uses."
Sooo, no Ogg Vorbis players from Sony.
Zing!
Sony is about one of those companies seriously capable of making a real iPod killer.
iPods are by no means a superior product. it uses dated technology and lose out in terms of features and price to other players. What makes it sell is that it has the Apple brandname behind it.
I think Sony is about one of few competitors with the sort of brand that can compete if they get their act togather.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
I never understood why they do this.
I was livid when they created "memory sticks" and didn't offer anything that made them more compelling than SmartMedia or CompactFlash in terms of price, capacity or both.
You'd have to talk to MPEG about that. And it's a superior format (except for, I presume, some licensing issues), so I'm not sure why they'd want to.
It's tragic. Laugh.
Ken Kutaragi puts it best when he says, "We're growing up," and with any luck future devices won't be crippled with silly formats no one uses.
Growing up implies some sort of learning from ones experiences. Is this not the exact same situation as the Sony Betamax debacle? How about my Minidisc NT that broke trying to load my MP3s onto it. When are they going to grow up?
For that matter, Sony is doing it again with the PSP. Please, buy all the products you have bought in the past on our new media format. The irony of Universal Media Disk should not escape anyone. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me; fool me three times, realize me for a massive, faceless electronics and media company who has had a drop in overall product quality and customer care.
Yes, I know the main goal in business is to make money and grow, but to do that, you must serve the customer as well. At least, that used to be true.
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
I don't even see a necessity to make OGG the proprietary format. Bill Gates in his interview w/ Gizmodo said that they didn't put more codecs in one of their products because of the licensing of the codec.
He actually phrased it more like, "DRM issues," which is really absurd. It seems he's trying to embed it in people's skulls that licensing=copyright=DRM. Which is the same sort of semantic trickery MS and many large software companies have been using for a while to herd the masses into their 3x3 private pasture.
Anyway, my point is that I can't believe it slipped the interviewer's mind to point out FLAC, OGG, etc. have NO "DRM issues" whatsoever and would create a more robust product.
Sometimes I wonder...
Please stop stalking me, bro.
I don't see why people haven't adopted the OGG format yet: it has better compression and it's open source. Or maybe it's open sourceness is the problem...
. . . and it was to be expected they'd behave as such (you know, "protecting their intellectual property"). What you're seeing is neat in that a company that owns gazillions in copyrighted material is finally acknowledging that mp3 is OK by building and shipping mp3-playing devices.
Will Sony start selling mp3s of their content over the web? Hell no . . . you will never see the content owners sell soft copies of their stuff without DRM . . . but this is at least a step in the right direction for those that want better portability of the content across devices and platforms.
And even when they did bring out players (Net Walkman NW-E95/99) which supposedly play MP3 natively (rather than the download software converting to Atrac), they require Windows(tm) software to download the MP3s to the player. None of the adverts, neither the online retailers nor the product description on the Sony site, mention the need for Windows. Linux can mount the flash as a USB storage device and can download files, but no way will the player play them.
Ok, Bill Gates, your turn to admit how your products suck.
I know parent will get modded up because he mentions the words "DRM", and any paranoid rant about DRM on /. gets modded up automatically, but WTF???
Sony was apologizing for not including MP3 support on their MP3 players(they only supported Altrac) not that they are getting rid of altrac. Oh, and in case you didn't actually know, iPods support MP3, so I'm not really even sure what basis in reality your post has. Oh, and AAC is open, just the DRM on Apples music store purchases(called fairplay) is not.
Please, RTFA and know what you are talking about before your next paranoid rant.
Thank you come again.
Monstar L
I think that's great they can admit a an error like that, especially in this corporate day and age. I'm a huge fan of Sony products and was realy undecided about going with Sony for a portable music player on this fact alone and hadn't purchased anything yet as a result. I think I'll hold off some more as they should have something coming out fairly soon (??) that will fit the bill...
Thanks again, Sony!
-m
http://www.invisik.com
Ba-doom-tcsh!
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Apple's AAC has DRM in it.
my iPod mounts as a removable hard drive and is full of mp3s.
Devices are only crippled when they don't include formats that everybody wants. They can include all the formats in the world as long as they include the ubiquitous ones too. If they don't, then they are indeed crippled.
But there still is a long way... Ditch proprietary formats also on the hardware side. Bring back the good support you once had (European support is awful) Dont build machines which break down 2 days after the warranty expires and then charge huge sums for repair. And stop being assholes generally...
Before you read on, read this article by Steve Albini (one of the best known producers in the world) about the reality of the economics of the music industry. If anything it understates the degree to which the music industry is broken.
I'm a musician as are many of my friends. Musicians, or the vast majority of them anyway, do not make music to make money but to make music. Historically of course, it was ever thus. Before the means of recording music, there WAS no recording industry. The vast majority of great music in history was written without the RIAA's help and without the 'protection' of copyright. It didn't seem to bother Beethoven.
The small minority of professional musicians mostly make their money from live performances (cruise ships, bars etc). A small minority of the small minority of professional musicians make money from recording, but a large part of this is non-consumer oriented such as film soundtracks, game scores, stings, jingles, ads and so on.
The current inflection of the recorded music industry benefits only the major corporations and a few bands who have enough leverage to make deals that actually result in money. The vast majority of bands who record make little or no money.
If we were drowning in a sea of great music produced by the members of the RIAA I would be the first to defend them, but we aren't. We're drowning in garbage, and thousands of good bands languish unsigned and unproduced. You only have to watch American Idol to see how the process works.
Fortunately now the innards of a pro recording studio can reside on your home PC or Mac, and raison d'etre of the major studios no longer exists. Musicians can go back to doing what they have always done -- making music. Once the recording industry finally dies, those who make great music will earn lots of money from live performances and direct-pay-downloads spread by viral word-of-mouth.
If you think I'm wrong, consider this: poetry. Pretty much nobody makes any money out of poetry. But it still gets written. The same is true of music. The sooner the industry dies, the better.
I'm not wrong. You haven't thought about it hard enough.
That would be the Apple iPod that had MP3 from day 1, Mr Thicky.
Before iPod Apple had about 3% of the U.S. personal computer market share. After iPod, Apple has about a 3% market share. iPod however has about 70% of the mobile digital audio market. iPod is just a good product. It's fashionable, it's crash proof and if people read the instruction manual with it, it's battery will last quite a long time. Also most iPod users use the Microsoft Windows platform. I doubt you'll see any iPod Killer from Sony. If you watched the MacWorld expo and have read any of the rumors on the web you'd have noticed a technology glasnost has occurred between Sony and Apple. I expect more cooperation not competition.
Popular? Just because a lot of people are forced to use them does not mean they are "popular". Using this definition, traffic tickets are popular too!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I seem to have plenty of non-encumbered AAC and MP3 files on my iPod. The Sony players required DRM enabled ATRAC only. You don't have to buy songs from the iTunes Music Store if you don't want to and your iPod will work fine. No, the iPod won't play .ogg files, but that is a very small loss compared to playing ATRAC only.
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
What do I care what sony makes, as long as someone else makes something I want. Sony or whoever can make all the silly useless gadgets they want, as long as Apple and Creative are making player that understand the MP3 format. It is not like the OGG problem, in which few players work with it, and few major market vendors are taking it seriously.
Sony needs to be honest. They took a risk based on greed and fear. The risk turned out not to work. It was not a mistake. It was a calculated risk in an effort to protect thier content based a belief that they should be paid at least for every piece of Sony IP, if not for each access to they Sony IP.
Again, I don't care. As long as there is reasonable choice, it matters not what an individual company does. It won't stop future attempts to destroy choice for consumers. Nothing ever does. And with these huge companies, such decisions, unfortunately, will not lead to bankruptcy.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
MiniDisk, El Cassette, ATRAC, Betamax, Memory Stick... not a good track record for Sony. Wonder if their support for BluRay will jinx the format...
Did Netcraft confirm it?
Generally, I get bored with my replies and give up on making sense halfway through.
There's a reason why Sony put Memory Sticks in their devices. It's so that they can *gasp* sell more memory sticks.
Proprietary formats are the way of big business. "You've bought our system, now let us sell you accessories." Anyone who owns a console game system should be well familiar with this. Why can't I use the same memory card on my Gamecube and my PS2? Because they don't want you too. Why are all of the controller ports different and not just simple USB? This is especially glaring as the Xbox is standard USB with a funky plug. Manufactures make the big money selling add-ons or licensing fees from third partys who make add-ons.
Proprietary formats are there to create another license revenue stream for the manufacturer. It's not that OGG isn't popular, it's just that they don't control it. Sony has demonstrated that they would dump MP3 if they could. DRM is there not so that you don't pirate the media contents, but so that the format licensor can legally force it's usage and force payment for said usage.
If Apple did make it an open format[...]
It's not Apple's format, the rights for AAC(!) are owned by a group of companies and institutes. So it's not Apple's choice to open it.
Ken Kutaragi, president of Sony Computer Entertainment, said he and other Sony employees had been frustrated for years with management SCE are the Playstation people. The Playstation people say "Sony screwed up". The Walkman people are probably still creaming their pants over how nobody wants MP3 and would prefer ATRAC
Maybe it works on other people, but when I'm looking for a device like a digital camera, if I see the word "Sony" I just keep-on-a-movin. I already own plenty of CF and SD cards, i'm not about to start buying "Sony Memory Sticks" any time soon, so I skip Sony products alltogether. Great job Sony!
From TFA:
Mr Kutaragi - known as the "Father of the PlayStation" for making the game machine a pillar of Sony's business - said the new PSP, or PlayStation Portable, handheld will grow into a global platform for enjoying music and movies as well as games.
Ummm, no it won't. Movies maybe, but not music. It's too big. Why don't these companies understand that people are looking for three things in music players:
1) Useful
2) Small
3) Beautiful
So far the only company (IMHO) who seems to have this figured out is apple.
obviously, you've never owned a Sony "mp3 player." i bought my fiancee one for christmas. All over the packaging it proclaimed "MP3 and WMA Compatibility" and even has MP3 in the model name. The packaging even refers to it as an MP3 player.
In reality, it includes a conversion utility in the package that converts MP3 and WMA to AAC for playback on the device. Therefore, it is an "MP3 Player" that does not natively play MP3s. When I buy an MP3 player, I want to be able to just drag and drop MP3s to it natively and have it parse and read them without any smoke and mirrors going on behind the scenes.
when you get down to the crux of it, it's very borderline to a bait and switch. but, IANAL, so i don't know how far an argument like that would go.
personally, I am very glad to see them acknowledge this faux pas. now, i wish they would release a firmware update or something to fix those old "MP3 players" so that they play back MP3s properly.
[move
No, because even if it's USB, the device can still either be PS2-compatible (for instance) or not, and advertised as such.
... that's no better/worse than the plug just not fitting in the first place.
The plug might fit and the device might not work
And if the memory cards were all, say, CF, what would be the problem? It's a known spec, and easy to accomodate.
Does ZIP have a recovery record option yet?
I've been using RAR because it usually nets me a few extra % reduction, which I can reallocate to placing a recovery record.
I started doing this when I pulled some old CDs out that I had trouble reading. Typically, if a ZIP had an error, I was screwed. RAR has allowed me to repair files, etc.
I also like PAR files! Call me names now please.
Incorrect.
it uses dated technology and lose out in terms of features and price to other players.
Correct; by any and perhaps all of these means, there are a number of products definitely superior to the iPod.
However, if your means of comparison is file space per gram or per cc, it has few competitors; and if your means of comparison is based on quality of interface, the iPod is definitely superior to the competition. One need not use bleeding edge tech to create a superior product, you can simply put existing stuff together better than anyone else.
Apple does human-use engineering better than almost anyone else. I didn't find the cost worth the improved usability, and went with an Archos product. I also prefer a command line to a window; this may mark me as an uber-geek, but far more certainly marks me as a weirdo. (Of course, the fact that I refer to iPod users as "pod people" is more obvious evidence....) Most humans place a higher value over improved usability than on improvements to other features.
I think Sony is about one of few competitors with the sort of brand that can compete if they get their act togather.
With this, I agree completely.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Did anyone else notice how much stage time the President of Sony got during the Stevenote? Not only was he up there a loooong time but he was gushing like a little school girl in love. The Reality Distortion Field was on full blast and Steve had it pointing right at Sony's president.
I suspect there was much more that went on behind the scenes that week that will unfold over the course of the year.
Despite Steve's claim that this is the year of High Definition we all know that HD is not his focus.
How long has he been telling us that Apple doesn't want to make a $500 dollar Mac while secretly designing it for the past year?
How many times did he tell us that flash based MP3 players were a waste until he had one of his own?
How many times did he badmouth PDAs which he later admitted he had developed but decided not to ship?
My intuition tells me that one or more of the following will happen this year...
1) Sony will license FairPlay
2) Sony will start selling Sony banded iPods
3) Sony will make its own music player which uses the iPod OS
4) Sony and Apple will jointly develop new digital lifestyle products
5) Sony will become a Mac OS X licensee(eliminates the single source argument)
Sony could make iPod killer a looong time ago! Even before first flash-based mp3 players like Rio.
They just needed to add mp3 decoder to MD and make MD as a USB/FireWire mass storage device. Sony liked FireWire aka iLink and they created PERFECT MD players - small, sexy and power-efficient.
Apple, in just four years has made us look silly in an industry we've owned since the 80s. We need to get our shit together.
"It'll destroy you if you try to make it mean anything to anyone but yourself." - Henry Rollins
no -- no fine print anywhere. we scoured the documentation and the packaging looking for anything to that effect and came up completely dry. in fact, the software doesn't even tell you that it's converting it -- it says something inane like "formatting for playback" or something like that. it takes a technophile to even realize what it's actually doing behind the scenes.
if i were joe public, i'd never even know that it's not actually playing MP3s.
[move
There is/was a plugin for OGG and the iPod. Google is your friend.
If they put out a dual-layer BluRay burner on the PC, and then put out a BluRay dual-layer player for HDTV. And then put out two different music players.
The video player would need to be able to handle OGM, Vorbis, MP3, AC3, Divx, Xvid. You'd have to be able to navigate sub-directories, and play by sub-directory. It'd have to have lasers capable of reading DVD's and CD's, of course.
On the players, they'll need two different types. One with a hard disk, and one that only uses flash memory. They should both run off standard AA batteries, and Sony should market a seperate Lithium Ion battery made specifically for the players. Let third-party companies make the LiON batteries, and let the consumer figure out what he/she wants.
The player with the hard disk should be able to handle Vorbis, MP3, AC3, ATRAC, MID, MOD. The flash player should be able to handle Vorbis and MP3. Both players should use either FAT32, or something like EXT2/3 for their file structures.
On top of everything else, Sony should make it's own simple little program and drivers (for the filesystems), for Win32/OSX/Linux/*BSD. Nothing fancy; just a simple exporer GUI, that lets you drag and drop and arrange things on the disk/memory. If they wanted to go the extra step, they could let you convert formats, with the full range of options that BeSweet allows you to select.
------
The PC burners, the stand alone players, and the music players. They'd be king, once again.
I don't honestly expect them to do that, though. Too many choices, probably too much customer support.
In addition to supporting Mp3, the new players will go up to "11".
I actually owned the Music Clip at one time. The interface software accepted either audio CDs, MP3 files, or WAV files as input, and transferred songs into the device. The transfer process took as long for each song as it did to encode each song into MP3, because the interface was indeed doing encoding, to ATRAC3. I don't remember much about sound quality, mostly because back then I still thought Sony's earbuds and headphones were pretty good (insert laugh track here). I do remember that the max you could encode in ATRAC3 was 144kbps, IIRC, but then you'd lose quite a bit of space on the flash memory. I would usually encode at 128 so I'd have the space, but the transfer process took so long, I only did about one or two transfers during the short time I actively used the device.
Sony's competition back then was already well established, with Diamond's Rio line. The 32 MB PMP300 had been out for around a year, and the 64MB PMP500 was just in. They also used an interface software, but it would carry MP3 files right over to the player, without doing any intermediary re-encoding. Creative was soon to come out with a flash-based player, and later the HDD-based Nomad Jukebox. RCA also had an MP3 player come out, and much like RCA's other electronic devices, was avoided like the plague by those in the know. These non-Sony players dealt natively with MP3, used standard removable flash media without "content protection" locking, and frankly worked better than Sony's pittance of an offering, even in the infancy of the portable music player market. Sony's players were left in the dust, their only remaining market being the fanatics.
Fast-forward to today. Past the fall of Napster, the maturation of the LAME encoder, the introduction of Ogg Vorbis, the iPod, larger flash capacities and lower flash prices. For the same $300 price of the Music Clip back in 2000, one could buy a Palm Tungsten E (today's equivalent of the Vx back then), fit it with a 128 MB MMC card, install AeroPlayer, load the Palm up with a bunch of songs in Ogg format, and go. The Palm also has a bit more bang for buck, considering you can use it as a clock, calendar, day planner, flashlight, MATLAB-esque calculator, etc. Plus, many portable music players allow the user to just copy the files directly into the storage medium instead of tangling with a proprietary transfer interface with proprietary drivers. I can just throw my MMC card into a flash reader, copy what I want into the card directly, and go. I can even do it from Linux! So where's Sony in all of this? Still stuck in 1999, with their "Sonic Stage" software, which still encodes everything it receives into ATRAC3, which is all Sony's players can still handle. Their big marketing push during the years was that they had MiniDisc players that can be loaded up with MP3s (which had to be converted to ATRAC3). They even advertised that the
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Sony IMHO is going into serious trouble.
The mp3 controversy is far from the only thing. It's not even close.
Sony lacks the inovative feel that it used to have. Sony used to be much more bleeding edge. Their designs were cutting edge... but not really any more.
IMHO Apple used to trail them. Now Apple is beyond them.
Sony has been late to the game for quite a few things over the years, then failed. mp3 players, laptops, computers, etc etc.
Their Clie PDA's weren't bad. But didn't quite live up to the Sony Hype. They were just better than Palm and Handspring... like that takes much.
IMHO this isn't the fix. Sony needs to rediscover themselves.
In an age of companies being more inovative (Apple, Samsung, LG, etc.)... time to redraw the box THEN think outside of it.
I don't know much about the UMD format, but one thing I was wondering was if the UMD discs are actually small blu-ray discs. That would have been really smart on Sony's part, to let people then burn mini-bluRay discs in the future and play them on the PSP.
However cool that would be though, I am very doubtful it is the case. I thought I'd just throw a scenario out there that could explain some rational reason to go with UMD...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The plugin wasn't for Ogg on the iPod. Instead, it was a Quicktime plugin that allowed iTunes to play Ogg-encoded files, albeit with less than perfect tag editing and a noticeable delay in beginning to play the file. I have it on my computer for the few Ogg files I have remaining, but I don't think I've actually added any Ogg songs in a year or so. Simply put, I don't see any point in doing so in my case, when AAC and MP3 work just fine for what I do.
Want Slashdot headlines on your site? Try SlashHead
The problem for Sony is not that they lack engineering or design prowress. Sony is not just Sony, they are Sony Electronics, SCEA, Sony Disc Manufacturing, Sony Entertainment (music and movies), etc. Sony Entertainment will never let Sony Electronics design a music player that could "threaten" their profits. Sony Disc Manufacturing, which also produces memory sticks, would never let a music player going out that wouldn't benefit their company.
That's one reason why Apple's iPod has been far more successful than Sony's playuer, even though Sony has had a major foothold on CD and tape players for 20 years. The iPod's only attachments are iTunes and the Mac; and Apple learned quickly that isolating the iPod to the Mac was a mistake. Whether this kind of intracorporate meddling affects the PS3 and its dependence on Blu-Ray remains to be seen.
This will sound crazy, but follow my logic here.
.m4p format apple uses to protect content.
There are tons of players that do ATRAC out there. Virtually all the Sony music stuff these days does either ATRAC and MP3 or just ATRAC. That's a lot of devices.
Here's how sony can win out over Apple in the end.
Put together and open source an implementation of ATRAC. If they did that, there would immediately be tons of proprietary and non-proprietary implementations of ATRAC for every platform. Then put the thing out there in a standards body and get it sanctioned. I know some people in Sony think they have the Holy Grail with ATRAC, but as it stands, its virtually useless. If ATRAC is out there and popular, it would be a viable option to the
Its that's simple. Seriously. Sony could go from last to first in less than a year.
They would still have to do MP3, of course, but like Apple, they could do MP3 and ATRAC, set up a music store, and then by licensing the DRM to other music stores, effectively take control of the market.
I doubt this will happen, but it really would work.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Has Sony really learned the lesson about fighting preexisting standards to its own disadvantage? Then why virtually all Sony digicams sport _only_ Sony proprietary memory stick for flash memory? Even when memory stick costs roughly twice the compact flash equivalent?
Answer: Sony has not learned the underlying lesson and continues to commit the same betamax faux pas indefinitely. It's OK when they win a format war (Playstation*), but they're too slow to realign when they can't possibly win.
Sony still needs to learn the fundamental lesson: play nice with the prevailing standards, and don't shoot yourself in the foot with unnecessarily proprietary standards.
= Joe =
Did they learn something after Betamax?
Did they learn something after DVD Regional Encoding?
Did they learn something after Memory Stick?
Did they learn something after that ridiculous proprietary music format?
The Sony learning curve looks like a horizontal line to me. They suffer from the same desire to "own" formats that MSFT does.
Ultimately both companies will lose to open standards.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Sony minidisc format is really good. A very small RW magneto-optical disk, with 1GB capacity in its latest reincrantation, and with a standard FAT directory structure. Alas, all minidisc players/recorders are still limited to Sony's proprietory ATRAC format, and a bunch of restrictions if you want to move those files between the players and you computer (yes, Sony tries to easy them a bit, but still those are files are *not* treated as the regular disk file). By adapting standards like MP3 and AAC, Sony minidisc format will finally have a chance. Just think of it. Fairly small player. More efficient (in terms of energy consumption) than hard-drive based player. The cost of media (per GB) is about in the same ball park as hard drive based players and better than the solid state (you can get 1GB disk for $7-10). Give me MP3 and AAC as the compression options - and I'll be seriously considering those players.
In Australia you can buy Sony DVD players that are multi-region, they are labelled as Region 4, but play all regions. Of course when their legal team now hears of this, maybe they will fix that......