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.'"

Comments

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

[MonkeyPaw]

Someone like my mother will go buy a new television - HDTV. She'll upgrade her cable box to HDTV. When it comes time to buy a new DVD player which do you think she'll pick? HD-DVD or Blu-Ray?

Of course she'll pick the HD-DVD because it sounds like it will work with her system.

As for the other Sony products.. I like their hardware. The Clie I have ran circles around the Palm out at the time. I HATED memorystick.

cliche retort

[xusr]

I bought Sony's original MiniDisc recorders for field recordings. It's a workhorse and is still performing like a champ. When I retired my Walkman (you know, the cassette kind...) after 12 or so years of continuous use, it was not for mechanical reasons.

Ok, so mod me down. I just had to respond to a knee-jerk comment with another.

Re:Those who ignore facts are doomed to look stupi

[Duds]

Most of those studios released UMD movies too.

For a while.

Re:Those who ignore facts are doomed to look stupi

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that assuming the upcoming format battle is limited to Blu-Ray and HD-DVD is too simplistic. I would add to the mix: existing DVD and the anti-format: movies via the internet. Exisiting DVD still looks quite strong since the quality improvements gained from DVD to Blu-Ray/HD-DVD arn't nearly as compelling as the gains when moving from VHS to DVD. Movies via the internet is more paletable every day with data rates improving and the cost of storage decreasing.

To me, it looks like a four horse race with DVD leading on the inside lane, Internet gaining ground on everyone else and HD-DVD and Blu-Ray weighed down by Big Media interested and lacking the speed to overtake DVD or outrun unfettered internet access.

Same as with audio

[drdanny_orig]

It's interesting that the history of SonicStage, the software Sony distributes with their consumer Walkman-type stuff (minidisc, "mp3" players, etc) is similar. The "preferred" format is ATRAC (.omg/.oma) a proprietary one that no other software supports. When MP3 was finally added, it was not truly MP3 -- rather it required you to process MP3 files through their software which SONY-ized it to a more propietary form of MP3. Today, when you plug a Bean player (Sony's previous generation iPod competitor) to a USB port, it's recognized as an external disc drive, but you cannot just drag-n-drop MP3 files (or even .omg files) to it and expect them to play: Sony insists on getting their hands into your audio data.

Original versions of Sony's minidisc platform wouldn't allow you to digitally upload material you had recorded. You had to route the audio outout and use an analog process to get the stuff to your PC. When customers complained, they responded by providing the upload capability, but you only had one shot at it: the recording was then marked uncopyable!!! Finally, they currently support unlimited uploading, but I suspect it has other odious restrictions.

If I didn't have so much invested in Sony hardware, I'd drop them like a rock.