Sony Announces End For MiniDisc Walkman 191
Beloved of concert tapers for their small size, shock resistance, and long battery life, MiniDisc recorders never much caught on with the general public. I remember playing with one in the early '90s — before high-quality solid state stereo recorders were affordable — and looking forward to the day that I would have one of my own. Playback-only decks were available, but understandably (in retrospect) never became big sellers; when MiniDisc was introduced, CDs were still a recent comer, and 8-track was fresh in the mind. Music fans were probably tired of replacing their vinyl and cassettes with the Next Big Thing. Still, with its cheap media and decent portable recorders, MiniDisc struck a chord for some uses, and stuck around better than the Digital Compact Cassette. Now, 19 years after the introduction of the MiniDisc format, Sony has announced that it will stop shipping its MiniDisc Walkman products in September, though it will continue to produce blank media.
Quite popular outside the U.S. (Score:5, Insightful)
Never much caught on in the U.S., you mean.
In the late 1990's, early 2000's portable minidisc players/recorders were incredibly popular in Japan and Europe.
Sony botched it. (Score:5, Insightful)
That was the most frustrating part of the MiniDisc format. My $300 MD player/recorder was crippled. It would have been nice to record an event (plugged into the board at a wedding), and then dump the audio to my computer for editing. But nooooo....Sony didn't want to give me that flexibility.
Sony ruins everything (Score:5, Insightful)
Sony is a company that cannot balance its products and services against its media and publishing. It is torn between offering innovative products and services and keeping media and publishing happy. Microsoft attempted to please media and publishing interests and Vista was the result. Microsoft saw the error in this but Sony cannot simply because it is too entrenched in those interests because it embodies those interests.
In general, I think it can be shown that media and publishing interests will never EVER be satisfied. The more they are given, the more they want and we all know inherently, there is no limit to greed. We see this in music, video and game entertainment industries all over. We all bemoan the changes they keep imposing but we, the consumer, are unable to influence their changes enough. Ideally, we vote with our dollars, but in reality, when we do, they arrive at the wrong conclusions and blame "piracy" and crap like that.
Wasted opportunity for Sony (Score:5, Insightful)
When Minidisc was announced I thought it would be a perfect removable storage solution; at the time people were using Syquest drives for "large" (44 and 88 MB) removable storage, and they were pricy; there was a market waiting for something cheaper yet still reasonably fast. I think a Minidisc could hold 250MB or something like that - good storage at the time, relatively cheap, and would probably have been pretty reliable.
However, Sony's anti-piracy worries made Minidisc inaccessible digitally - there were no Minidisc readers/writers and you could only use it for recording/playback of ANALOG audio!
Soon Iomega came out with the very popular 100MB ZIP drives and Sony's window of opportunity closed - and we got to enjoy crappy Iomega quality and the infamous "Click-of Death".
Sony does come out with cool tech sometimes, but their entertainment division screws it up every time. I guess Sony made their money from Minidisc, but they could have done so much more with it.