Rocky & Thread: Good Lord! So the stick of chewing gum becomes as inocuous as . . . a stick of chewing gum! As you note, however, there may be room enough for several formats when it comes to digital photography and music players. One way to look at the Sony avalanche is in terms of marketing, and whether sheer marketing muscle is all it takes to make a product successful. Sony twice tried this approach, with the betamax and later, with its 8mm video. The betamax lost out to VHS on the basis of one performance measurement -- the ability of VHS to record more video material on a single tape. The 8mm video cassette, while somewhat successful, has not been able to overcome the convenience of being able to play a compact VHS camcorder tape in a VHS machine, albeit with an adaptor.
The competition for market penetration in both digital cameras and music players, including the ability to download an entire movie to a flash memory, in my view will come down to the same betamax issue -- storage capacity. Eli Harari made some comments last fall about the differences in potential capacity between the MemoryStick and CF or MMC. He noted, I recall, that the shape of the MemoryStick would create an inherent problem to obtaining large storage capacity. I'm not well versed in engineering problems, but when one compares an oblong with a nearly square shape, the square format has many advantages.
As for compatibility between flash memory for the Play Station and other devices, I don't see the need, but maybe it's just because I've never had any interest in the types of games for which the Play Station and similar devices were designed. Ultimately performance at a given cost should carry the day. SNDK will have high capacity memory coming out of its Virginia plant long before Sony begins selling chips with half the memory. Sony will also have to contend with an array of competitors, including Mitsubishi, Toshiba, as well as dozens of camera companies such as Olympus, Nikon, and Canon, all of whom have signed on to a standard to which SNDK subscribes, and which is available without cost to all who want to use it.
In that respect, the competition is not similar to MSDOS v. Macintosh, except in reverse. Apple made a fatal error by not opening its format to the industry, thus paving the way for Microsoft based computers to become the de facto standard. Even though Apple was first with a windows format, their failure to open the system to competitors assured that PC based equipment would prevail except in selected applications. The fact that the Macintosh system still exists and is doing quite well against a much larger competitor must be related to one and only one characteristic -- performance at reasonable cost. Art |
