Blog Jones

GAAH! I hate Sony’s obsession with proprietary formats. They started with the Betamax (the competitor to VHS for video tapes). Since then, they’ve tried to make a proprietary version of virtually every medium and every format. They’re trying it with the Blu-Ray disc, which is competing with HD-DVD as the successor to the DVD. I mean, even their original MP3-player devices couldn’t support MP3’s; you had to convert your music over to the proprietary ATRAC format that nobody uses!

The one place where their business incompetence most shines is in their Memory Stick formats–there’s the Memory Stick, the Memory Stick Pro, the Memory Stick Pro with Magicgate, the Memory Stick Duo, and so on and so on. Note that I can’t use my 512MB Memory Stick in, say, a Sony PlayStation Portable, because that only accepts the smaller Memory Stick Duo’s.

Well, now they’re adding another version to the pile: The extremely tiny Memory Stick Micro M2. It’s 15mm by 12mm by 1.2mm, which Engadget tells me is about a quarter of the Memory Stick Duo’s size. Not only is it another memory stick format, it’s so small that you’re likely going to lose it. In fact, you could probably inhale this Memory Stick if you weren’t careful.

In case a Sony exec is reading: This kind of fooling around is why I’m extremely skittish about buying Sony products. I know they’re great, high-quality products, but I get sick of getting stuck with overpriced ^* proprietary formats. Quit trying to mess with your customers and stick with standard formats that everyone uses. Like Secure Digital.

*Worse than the proliferation of the memory sticks formats is their cost. Right now a 512MB SD card costs $26. A 512MB Memory Stick Pro is $43–a 60% difference!)

This entry was posted on Friday, September 30th, 2005 at 9:33 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.