[Jeff Lewis @ Jan 21st 2006 8:42PM]

To the people defending Sony's proprietary standards for storage, they're missing a couple of basic issues. The fact that you like it (or more accurately, you don't mind it) isn't much of a selling point.

When I have a camera, a videogame, a DAP, a PDA and so on, and each one uses a different standard for storage, it becomes a pain and expensive. Sony uses MemoryStick for a simple reason: if you have any one Sony product which uses it - you're more likely to buy other Sony products, just to share the same media.

That's a lousy way to get customers.

But there's a bigger issue - even if we accept the notion that it's ok to have several dozen storage formats, Sony doesn't even consistently support them on their own platforms! Why invent a whole new format (UMD) when they already had a format (MiniDisk)? They could have used the same physical format even if the actual media itself isn't compatible, and then offer compatibility with existing MiniDisks.

Why don't they use MiniDisk in their disk cameras? Why use recordable CD?

And so on and so on.

Sony's media saga is legendary for the degree of self-inflicted injury they've caused. The only good news? Well, it took a while, but they finally realised that Atrac wasn't going to catch on and people wanted MP3.. which they FINALLY started to include.

Perhaps there's hope that Sony will think more about the customer than trying to push their proprietary standards.