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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.'"
They could get away with this if they still made quality products, but they have flooded the market with a ton of junk. After buying several sony items that quickly died on me I will never buy sony again. The propietary stuff is just icing on the cake.
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Far from being poorly supported, Blu-Ray has wide industry support (over 90 companies) and has the following companies on the Blu-Ray Disc Association board of directors.
* Apple Computer
* Dell
* Hewlett Packard
* Hitachi
* LG Electronics
* Mitsubishi Electric
* Panasonic (Matsushita Electric)
* Pioneer Corporation
* Royal Philips Electronics
* Samsung Electronics
* Sharp Corporation
* Sony Corporation
* TDK Corporation
* Thomson
* Twentieth Century Fox
* Walt Disney Pictures
* Warner Home Video Inc.
Of the major media houses, only Universal Pictures has pledged support for HD-DVD.
HOw is it any more proprietary then Toshiba's HD-DVD (or whomever the designing company is)? This isn't a rhetorical question, I just don't know how.
Both techs seem to be upgrades with associated licensing fees for the tech. Do DVD's lack any licensing fee's to whomever originally designed it?
Hmmm... Pie...
...if it loses. If Blu-ray wins, it's Sony making an absolute killing by developing the standard for hi-def DVD content. The author ignores that, and that the situation he described with Betamax is apples and oranges with Blu-ray (i.e. Sony making deals with dozens of companies to get Blu-ray drives and discs out).
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.
My studio - www.graylands.ca
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.
It doesn't matter to me who wins in the HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray battle. Why? Because regular DVD's look great! High definition looks better than non-HD, but not THAT much better (especially considering the costs). Sony says the ps3 will cost less than a blu-ray player... that's at $600! You can get an amazing DVD player for $150 with all the bells and whistles. When HD-DVD/Blu-Ray come to market and start to popularize, you can bet plain old DVD prices will drop. From a financial sense, DVD's trump HD-DVD and Blu-Ray DVD. ...not to mention that yargh, I'm a pirate matey, and I like to rip/burn DVD's -- something that'll be nerfed with Blu-Ray/HD-DVD.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
Ya, Compact Disc - developed by Phillips, not Sony. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-i I heard it turned out really well.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
Their proprietary formats recently have probably met the first goal of proprietary formats: feeds revenue into the company. Unfortuantely, they just keep failing to be adopted as defacto standards (for good reasons).
Look at their memory stick. While they didn't succeed it making it the de facto standard for portable media, I'm sure it's worked great for them. Their cameras, PSP, etc all use it and between their manufacturing and licensing I'm sure it helps them out some.
The PSP's UMD bombed for movies, that's a given, but it was a worthwhile "attempt." Personally, I think it was the price that killed it, had they made it cheaper than it would have been worth it for travelling purposes (and only travelling).
Sure, technologically UMB is not the best for gaming because of the power/loading time associated with discs but I'm sure the licensing helps them, but it was a good effort. Storing a lot of data for personal gaming probably doesn't have too many options. Besides, if company X wants to print a game for the PSP they get a piece of the production fee one way or another.
I have a feeling Blu Ray is where it all hits the fan. Unlike it's other more recent proprietary formats which can supplement their own products, Blu Ray can only survive on its own in the wild. It must be adopted as the main video format or else there's just little point in it. Sure if it fails you can still sell Blu Ray burners for Desktops and such, and if PS3 goes Blu Ray then publishers will need to kick a few pennies to Sony.
But in the end, it needs to beat out HDDVD to win and the only way that could happen is if they beat it to market or offered it as a cheaper alternative. I guess we'll see what happens here.
You know, if you're going to try to point out the flaw in my post, at least point to the right Wikipedia article. Yes Philips did have a major role in the creation of the Compact Disc (and later, CD-i). However, it only came about after they joined forces with Sony to develop it into a consumer medium.
This guy's the limit!
CompUSA are now offering a variety of BluRay Products for pre-order.
I wasn't bothered by the UMD format because it was specific to the PSP; sending out PSP games on SD cards or other compatible media was a waste of time because the games wouldn't run on any other system in the first place. Movies on UMD were inevitable since the PSP is a pretty good movie player, other things being equal. That Sony figured it was going to license the UMD format to other vendors seems pretty short-sighted to me, though. (Likewise Memory Sticks. Yuck.)
So, I agree with the idea that Sony is taking the wrong tack. I just need something more substantial than "Sony wants our money" as the rationale.
Most of those studios released UMD movies too.
For a while.
My great story is when I bought a MiniDisc player and thought it was great. Then, slowly but surely the proprietary Atrac3 format became more and more of a hastle. Forcing me to store 2 copies of all my music on my PC. Not to mention the extremely slow conversion and transfer rates to the damn thing.
I still have yet to shell out of a true MP3 player or iPod rather opting to burn CD's of anything I want to listen to. I will still, from time to time pull it out and load some songs onto it. But it just isn't worth it.
Oh yeah, and lets not talk about how the navigation buttons rarely work the way they are supposed to due to poor design.
Buttons aren't toys.
Well, HD-DVD is already out on the market... so let's see if they can go for cheaper.
Wait, it's Sony...
It always seems to come up that Betamax was 'technologically superior' to VHS, and there's always some /.er who posts a refutation. Instead of being redundant, I'd argue that Minidisc was Sony's worst "technologically superior" failure. MD came about a few years before Zip, and had more storage capacity (177 MB versus 100 MB), a smaller form-factor, and the discs were cheaper. However, the software was terrible for audio (you had to record directly into the audio jack) and there was no way to use MD as portable storage until long after the iPod had arrived. There was a huge market for Zip as a middleware between floppy (1.44") and CD-R, and Sony could've aimed MD towards that market and done well (and provided a superior product to those damn Zip disks).
.mp3 and provides hard drive functionality...but too little, too late.
I would hope that Sony has learned the lesson of MD: superior technology without user-friendly software is worthless.
Even when the first hard-disk mp3 players started coming out, Sony 'updated' with the NetMD software. That software must've been the inspiration for the rootkits of 2005, and was one of thoe most user-unfriendly products I've ever seen. Still no data-recording, even though competing players had that function, and an annoying three-copy rule on each mp3. Add this to a proprietary format and you get a terrible experience - no wonder MD never caught on. Even so, the hardware was good - the HiMD update allows
In accordance with E.O. 12958, this post is marked Unclassified.
I'd prefer bringing back the tape or having cartridges with plastic casing (like NES games) so my media doens't need replacement every 5 years. I remember seriously abusing NES games and cassette tapes and having them still work.
Both HD-DVD and Bluray are optical disks that will not play if scratched. If the media itself wasn't so fragile people won't need to back it all up in the first place. I won't be buying into any of this fragile DRMed media that will not play if scratched until I am able to back it up first.
Sony has a virtually guaranteed market for blu-ray disks in the PS3 gaming market. Unless the PS3 is a total failure I doubt blu-ray could be a real loser. I don't blame Sony for trying to use that market to push HD-DVD out of the market.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
The last Sony products I bought were Walkman Cassette players and a Trinitron TV. Back then those products were values for the money. Now I look at everything from digital camcorders to various music players and see no good value. I see locked in technology that would cost me more to own so I find something else to buy that does give me value and quality for my money. The article mentions Betamax, the memory stick and that stupid mini-disc, all examples of proprietary, expensive and locked down technologies from Sony. If Blu-Ray is the same it'll have the same fate as the other products Sony has tried to pawn off on us. It'll smell like a turd but they'll have pretty girls and advertisements telling us that's flower perfume we're smelling but it'll still be turd. Sony thinks that they have the video game players locked in because of the PS1 and PS2 and they reason that those folks will migrate to whatever nonsense Sony puts down in front of them. This was the reasoning with the mini-disc and the memory stick as well. Sony thought they had the personal music player market locked up. I mean after all, wasn't the walkman the most popular thing on the planet? Folks won't mind if we lock them into our Sony's expensive stuff. Only it didn't work that way, other music players came and other memory options came out and that market once owned by Sony was gone with the wind. The article writer Jonathan V. Last is right, Sony is a prisoner of their own internal logic and keeps making the same fatal mistakes.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
The problem with the memory stick is that a lot of people went out of their way to avoid anything using a memory stick, simply because it tied you to expensive Sony products. And memory stick is one of the most confusing as hell "standards" out there with numerous variants. I have one device that uses a memory stick - a PSP. I certainly have no intention of buying any other Sony product because of it. The PSP's UMD bombed for movies, that's a given, but it was a worthwhile "attempt." Personally, I think it was the price that killed it, had they made it cheaper than it would have been worth it for travelling purposes (and only travelling).
Definitely the price. It should have been $10 or less per movie. Attempting to flog a movie for more than its DVD equivalent on a proprietary format that only plays on one device is sheer stupidity. It is doomed to fail. Still, Sony could salvage the situation and drive memory stick sales if after dumping UMD they opened up the PSP to play ripped movies at full res. They could still make a lot of money. Better yet (for them) if they hand out something akin iTunes for doing the ripping which also manages syncing the device and links to their own reasonably priced store. I read a rumour that there would be an 8Gb PSP soon so perhaps they are planning something like this. It has the potential to be great, but Sony is like an anti King Midas - turning gold into shit - so who knows.
Other than videos, the PSP is fairly reasonable as far as DRM goes. I can play MP3, AAC, WMA music and rip my own videos. The resolution thing is an annoyance but ripped movies look pretty fine anyway so it's not a big deal. If UMD dies, they should definitely unlock the restriction though.
I couldn't care less between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. I feel both formats are irrelevant unless you have an HD TV, or a computer with a BD/HD-DVD ROM. All I care about is that one of them wins so this pointless pissing contest is over. Personally I feel it will be Blu-ray that wins but I guess judgement must be reserved for six months at least to see what happens with the PS3. Again, the PS3 could be an awesome device assuming Sony internal politics don't castrate the thing.
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.
UMD can only be played on the PSP, and only on the PSP's display.
Blu-ray Discs can be played on any BD player (when they're shortly available), and on any display. (With varying resolutions.)
Any attempt to compare the two is either misinformed or biased.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
The studios listed for HD-DVD are *also* listed for BR ("CYA group"), but Sony's got more lined up for BR only. When little Joey wants his Disney fix in HD, and the parents find out it's only to be had on BR, guess what wins? Add the gaming boost from Playstation's market share and Sony may actually have something here.
Being old enough at the time, I seem to recall the video-tape wars.
Sony had a better product, it was smaller and had a higher quality then VHS.
It wasn't that it was inferior, their mistake was that they didn't license it.
It was shortsightedness that brought them down, much like what happened to the Amiga. If the opened up to other manufacturers, they probably would have taken Apples place, if not along side them. They were an awesome thing.
Sony lost out, only because of price, not quality. Same reason I wait to upgrade my video card only when I need to. I only spend 50$ or so. That way the ones that are a couple of hundred now.. will be there for my pickings then.
Sweet.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
Well, only Universal has EXCLUSIVELY pledged support to HD-DVD. Sony are obviously Blu-Ray exclusive and Fox are in that camp for the moment, but most of the others are fence-sitting by either planning for both, or publicly letting it be known that they'll jump if HD-DVD does well in the next 6 months or so.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Sorry about that, my eyes have come to ignor instances of the "i" when used. All those iPod wannabes. Here's the quote and the correct link. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc "In the early 1970s, using video Laserdisc technology, Philips' researchers started experiments with "audio-only" optical discs, initially with wideband frequency modulation FM and later digitized PCM audio signals. The compact disk was thus developed by Philips from its own 12 inch Philips Laservision disks." I already knew that Phillips and not Sony developed the CD. In my store of useless information. Additionally, it was not and is not a closed down proprietary format which nullifies your point anyways. I do also remember that Phillips has been none to happy with the locked down and drm'ed music discs sent out and wants those to not carry the 'CD' label on them. You know, I miss the old days when you go and flame folks and get flamed back. Anyone know of any places like that? :-)
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
You make it sound like Sony was the only company backing their technology in the past, and that was the reason they failed.
As well as Sony and Sanyo, Betamax video recorders were also sold by Toshiba, Pioneer, Aiwa and NEC. The Zenith Electronics Corporation and WEGA Corporations contracted with Sony to produce VCRs for their product lines. Department Stores like Sears in the US and Quelle in Germany sold Beta format VCRs under their house brands as did the Radio Shack chain of electronic stores.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betamax
The HD DVD Promotion Group also has a rather long list of members, among them:
-
Broadcom Corporation
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CANON INC.
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FUJI PHOTO FILM CO., LTD.
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Fujitsu Limited.
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Hewlett-Packard Company
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Hitachi Maxell, Ltd.
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Imation Corp
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Intel Corporation
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Kenwood Corporation
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Konica Minolta Opto, Inc.
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Lenovo Japan
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Microsoft Corporation
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Mitsubishi Kagaku Media Co., Ltd. / Verbatim
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NEC Electronics Corporation
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Paramount Home Entertainment
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RICOH COMPANY LTD.
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SANYO Electric Co., Ltd.
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TEAC CORPORATION
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TOSHIBA CORPORATION
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Ulead Systems, Inc.
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Universal Pictures
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Warner Home Video Inc.
http://www.hddvdprg.com/about/member.htmlIf Universal Pictures is the only media house supporting HD-DVD, it does seem a bit strange that Warner Home Video Inc. and Paramount Home Entertainment are also members of a group promoting HD-DVD...
Frame for frame, sony had a better product. But they lost because VHS came out with tapes that could hold more. Doesn't matter for rentals, but when you stick your tape in, and want to record the superbowl, or a movie that with commercials has been stretched out to 3 hours, it made a difference.
Many Japanese people agree with you... and so do I.
Sony used to be 'the' thing to get but for the past... I don't know, 8-10 years maybe, they've really seemed to have their heads up their asses. They are NOT Apple though they seem to think they are. What I mean by this is that in Apple's case, whatever they make is gold every time they slap their Apple logo onto anything. This is not so with Sony. There are too many competitors and Sony is not a culture all its own as Apple is at the moment.
My bad experiences with Sony started when I was selecting a laptop. I wanted to run a Japanese OS and expected that since Sony was a Japanese company, that I wouldn't have any trouble getting support. Boy was I EVER wrong on that. I should have gotten an IBM! It ha(d) WAY better Japanese language support than any other at the time. Pretty amazing considering it was an American company.
And from that point forward, my bad experiences with their stuff just kept piling up. I've been 'done' with Sony since about 5 years ago. Now I just wait for them to die.
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.
.nosig
It was made obsolete by Sony's other great experiments like Digital Audio Tape (DAT), MiniDisc (MD), Super Audio CD (SACD) and of course RootKit Enabled CD (RECD).
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Most studios released stuff on minidisk and betamax too.
Any attempt to compare the two is either misinformed or biased.
You completely missed the parents point. Using studio support as a metric for determining which format to support is meaningless, as the studios listed supported UMD which was a complete failure.
When I sold electronics I was told this story:
Sony said you could make Beta machines but had to pay a $25 royalty fee.
JVC said you could make VHS and had to pay a 25 cent royalty fee.
I don't know if this is true but it was what all us sales grunts were told to say by our manager. Who knows, perhaps it is even true...
Didn't find the specifics on Wikipedia -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betamax
Are we perfect? No. But where I should move when I renounce my U.S. citizenship, North Korea, Libya, China, or Iran?
To: Howard Stringer, CEO, Sony Corporation
From: Djinns'R'Us, Wish Granting Department
Re: Recent requests after bottle opening
Dear Mr. Stringer,
We are pleased to announce that we have fulfilled your latest request: to make Sony "the next Apple". Although we had to steal resources from projects in our Monkey's Paw Department, we have managed to complete this task up to your specifications.
We hope you enjoy the restructuring. Sony now resembles Apple, circa 1996.
Sincerely,
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
UMD could have been successful, if Sony "opened" it up more. I think that's the heart of the matter. It's not that they have propretary formats. It''s just that they cling to them too tightly.
I would have been very interested in a UMD drive form my computer. Small, well protected. Burn my own PSP media. Very cool. It woud And a blu-ray based UMD disc later on (for PSP2) would have been the bomb. And if I could plug my PSP into my TV and watch the UMD like that would be very cool too. I actually wish Sony would retry with UMD, but this time do it right.
T.
:T:R:A:N:S:
The submission makes it sound like Jonathan Last is some kind of technical expert. He's just a reporter on the technology beat. He does make some good points in the article, but he also makes some of the lame mistakes ("the DVD already had one competitor, DivX" and "household gadgets needed in a war-ravaged country: rice cookers and heating pads") typical of those self-taught "experts" who doesn't know technology as well as they think they do.
Sure, sure, higher resolution video entertainment is a pleasant luxury item, but it boggles the mind to see it described as "something we really need".
I mean, solutions to problems of social injustice, environmental degradation, resource exhaustion, those are things we really need. Prettier ways to watch movies in our livingrooms are nice, and something I'll certainly be spending money on when their available and affordable, but hardly a necessity.
Well, I'm not a pirate. And the choice between HD-DVD and BR-DVD matters to me. Why? Capacity! I want it for a recording medium. With 15GB for HD-DVD and 25GB for BR-DVD, the latter would be the way to go if the pricing between them would be equivalent. Obviously, if BR-DVD stays at twice the price of HD-DVD, then it might not be worth it.
Of course the big market the manufacturers are looking at is the HD video media market, selling new players and licensing the manufacture of all that media being produced for it. But even there, having 25GB instead of 15GB means a better tradeoff between more content vs. less lossy compression. At the same compression, you can get 60-66% more content (or fewer disks for an entire mini-series in HD). For a fixed content, a higher quality level can be chosen for the compression.
One potential risk is that if the level of technology is really the same for both (I really don't know if it is or not) then the more dense format could be subject to more errors, given other things equal. In the end, we'll just have to see what works.
I think it will be a slower uptake. DVD's predecessor was VHS. That was a big difference. The jump from DVD to (HD/BR)-DVD requires a number of factors.
I think it will be hard enough to get a large consumer adoption even if there wasn't a format competition. I suspect that a large segment of willing buyers will put it off just to wait out the war and see who wins. Or maybe they are waiting for the less popular content that can't get shelf space in the stores while there are 2 formats of content competing for that shelf space (as well as DVDs).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
When I was a journalist, MD was great for recording interviews because of the far longer recording time than the usual micro-cassettes. I knew a couple of people who had problems making copies of their own recordings because of Sony's stupid copy management system (SCMA, or something like that? I can't remember), but my MD unit was a Sharp and never gave me any problems at all.
You must think in Russian.
UMD could have been successful, if Sony "opened" it up more.
Maybe if it had been a mini dvd that played in a dvd player. UMD confronts the problem that nobody is willing to buy the same dvd twice so they can play it on a psp. I'd rather spend the cash and rip my dvd to mpegs and watch them on a laptop.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Sony lost out, only because of price, not quality.
My dad has always been a fan of new technology. When we got a satellite dish (no cable in rural areas) we also decided to get a VCR so we could tape movies and such (we had a fairly advanced system with a high-gain C-Band LNB that worked with an "amazingly small" 8 foot dish!). After seeing a noticeable difference in picture quality we decided to get a Sony Betamax VCR despite the slightly higher cost.
It didn't take too long to become frustrated with the short recording time--I believe it topped out at 120 minutes, and there was a LOT of stuff that we recorded that ran over that. We did find longer tapes eventially that held 180 minutes that helped quite a bit, but they were harder to find and more expensive (over 50% more expensive even though they were only 50% longer). "But wait--I'm sure Beta tapes could hold more". Yes they could--but not when it first came out. Betamax ended up with three playback/record speeds (Beta I/II/III) like VHS, however The Beta III record speed was not on our machine (it wasn't on any at the beginning IIRC).
Eventually we had problems with our Sony VCR--it would play back but when recording the video would drop out--at first for a few frames, then for seconds to minutes, always at random intervals. We replaced it with a Sanyo--another Beta because of our existing library. This VCR could record in B-III so we now had an ample amount of time even on the most common-sized tape. However, VHS had gotten a foothold by then and aside from price, I recall the REAL selling point was the much bigger recording time.
There was another issue too which affected our alliegence to the Beta format even before it became too hard to find pre-recorded content. Eventaully our second Beta VCR suffered from the EXACT SAME RECORDING PROBLEM as the older Sony did. Perhaps this is anecdotal, but the repairmen said the same thing--that these problems with recording crpooed up more often in Beta VCRs than VHS, regardless of the make or model. So Beta VCRs might've had better PICTURE quality, VHS had better HARDWARE quality (more reliable). Given the delay in Blu-Ray player releases due to last-minute "extra testing", as well as the delays in the PS3 (and speculation that it is due to problems with the Blu-Ray player) it sounds like there could be some stubborn reliability problems, and with HD-DVD players and movies already out the pressure to get to market could possibly mean Blu-Ray players might be pushed out the door before they should be.
Of course it is much too early to predict a winner in this format war, and they may coexist for so long that both will be supplanted by an even newer technology before one camp wins. In any case there are a few uncomfortable signs that Blu-Ray has lost its edge from a market-competitveness advantage.
You're going to wait a long time. I have a Sony radio on my shelf, it was built in 1962. Sony is not going anywhere.
Unless you are some kind of console fanboy, why on earth would you want them to die rather than simply improve?
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
No, it's just simple greed, and that's not necessarily a bad thing either. They're supporting one format because they'd rather have just one format. The economies of scale are much greater for 1 format than for 2, and that means supporting 2 formats is going to cost them money. Sure they'd by denying you the choice of which format to have, but they also know a majority of their customers would rather not have the choice in the first place if the two formats are functionally the same.
The point was to try and get everyone using the same format, but the primary backer of HD-DVD appears to be Microsoft and they can afford to prolong the fight indefinitely.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
What sony is doing is pretty obvious, since they make alot of stuff that needs media in every shape and form, they "invent" new media that fits it.
t ory/0,12449,881780,00.html :-)
PSP = UMD, PSP + Sony Phones (thats alot) + Sony Professional stuff = Memory Sticks. Professional Broadcast still uses Beta.
Why use and pay royalties when you can create your own?
And minidisc actually won the format battle, they beat the DCC tape (you do remember that), only to be beaten to a bloody pulp by Napster and MP3 players.
Blu-Ray was proposed to the DVD forum but rejected over the Toshiba format, because HD-DVD is cheaper to make. The interesting question is, how much cheaper will it be when there is 25 million PS3s out there with games on Blu-Ray discs?
And why pick Blu-Ray over plain DVD for a next gen console? well consider this:
The PS-ONE was a 4MB machine with a 640MB media format, storage factor 160
The PS2 was 32MB machine with a 9GB media format, storage factor 280
The XBOX was a 64MB machine with a 9GB media format, storage factor 140
The 360 is a 512MB machine with a 9GB media, storage factor 18
The PS3 is a 512MB machine with a 50GB media, storage factor 94
Lets just for arguments sake say that most XBOX games took up 2GB space, most of that would be used for graphic assets i would guess.
This is on a machine with only 64MB memory, the 360 has 8 times the memory & 7 times less storage, and the need for higher res textures and more assets is evident.
Sony clearly chose the right format, its just damn expensive right now, but everyone knows that the best price for a product is where the production line can follow the demand, and in the PS3 case it will sell out at launch, it will be hard to get one for quite some time. After that period it will drop in price, Capitalism 101
And about the Betamax vs VHS war, give this a read.
"Read this, and the next time someone tells you that, of course, Betamax was superior to VHS, you can tell them that they are wrong. It's an urban myth."
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/comment/s
Basicly the VHS won because... it had more storage
ugh, stupid html. It should read like this:
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. We'll see. I'm no videophile, but I can see some pretty nasty digital artifacts from compression on DVDs, especially in dark scenes. The resolution may be better than VHS, but I'm not convinced the overall picture is.
The resolution isn't better then VHS. They are both 480i. The only quality improvement in DVD over VHS is that DVD is digital so the signal quality is better. There are fewer artifacts, but they are still plenty visible, especially on a big screen.
It's true that DVD was a big technological improvement over VHS, but the improvements were mainly convenience factors--menus and chapters so you didn't have to rewind and fast forward, small, durable form factor, multiple languages and subtitles, etc. High-def DVD will be a much, much larger improvement in quality over DVD then DVD was over VHS. Instead of just going from analog to digital (which gets converted back to analog on 99% of DVD player/tv setups anyway), you will get a true, 100% digital signal with an order of magnitude more pixels (1080p compared to 480i). I'll take that any day over those stupid chapter menus.
Because they keep influencing the industry with their methods. By this I mean prop formats that lock you in -- Sony is most famous for it, but others have tried to do the same thing. And with their quality going down but their prices continually going up they make all of us look even more like suckers than we are (which is saying a lot because so many are suckers) and that negatively influences the industry as well.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
He said that if they still made quality products.
AFAIK, MiniDiscs were around 1992, which qualifys as the not-so-recent past. I don't see how his comment is contradicting your comments about older Sony devices that worked well.
I got a Sony Vaio laptop from a friend, and the DC plug inside the laptop died promptly just after a year. After fixing that, AC power is kinda flaky and the laptop has basically become useless for me.