Yes, I really liked the memory stick and UMD formats. Too bad they were made by Sony and were thus uselessly crippled for any normal purposes.
You'd really think that Sony would have figured out that every single storage medium they've ever made has been an utter failure, but Sony is gonna Sony.
You'd really think that Sony would have figured out that every single storage medium they've ever made has been an utter failure, but Sony is gonna Sony.
This is a little funny in a thread about floppy disks, considering that the extremely popular and ubiquitous 3.5” Micro Floppy Disk was a Sony design ;)
There are also some other Sony formats that actually stuck, like DAT, Minidisc (yes, not so much in the US from what I gather, but it was A Thing in Europe, Australia and Japan) and Betacam.
Sony: Look at this awesome new storage format! Everyone should use it!
Also Sony: No, not like that.
Sony's positioning in storage formats is just weird. They spend untold money developing media formats intending to recoup the development costs licensing those formats. Then make the licensing fees and conditions so onerous that no one is willing to license them. The only time anyone touches a Sony influenced format is when it's developed and licensed by a consortium.
Sony has (or at least had; I haven't seen them try again for a while now) a long history of trying to push proprietary standards on everyone. They really seemed to think they could come up with some proprietary standard for something where other, more open, standards already existed, and people would somehow adopt theirs en masse.
It reminds me a lot of IBM when they introduced the PS/2 computers. They really, really thought that they could single-handedly kill all the PC "clones" by pushing their clunky, overpriced PC with a bunch of proprietary standards in it (namely the MCA bus). The people running these two companies had an extreme amount of arrogance and hubris.
