Sony has been trying to own type of media for decades. In fact, I think they have based their entire business plans on trying to make up for losing the Beta vs. VHS battle. Since that time, they’ve been trying to own a popular media for the last25 years. Only several failures, have they finally been successful with Blu-ray being the adopted media standard – Sony has backed Blu-ray from day one.
Sony’s R&D labs have produced a large number of media failures, the first and best known is Beta. Beta tapes were technically superior to VHS but VHS was adopted by the public and Beta was regulated to geeks and TV studios.
After they collaborated with Philips to create the CD, Sony tried to create several other media that all had one thing in common: proprietary rights by Sony. Sure other peopel were able to license them, but Sony wanted to whole value chain. Formats included the following failures: DAT (digital audio tape), MiniDisc, Memory Stick and UMD. They even tried to replace MP3′s with Atrac3.
Finally after Blu-ray has been defined as a defacto movie format standard, has the head of Sony pleged to be more “open” with their technologies:
If we had gone with open technology from the start, I think we probably would have beaten Apple. – CEO Sir Howard Stringer
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Another Sony standard, Memory Stick Micro, is now gone. Sony Ericsson is going to use MicroSD like everyone other handset manufacturer:
http://www.engadget.com/2009/06/01/sony-ericsson-ditching-memory-stick-micro-cards-in-favor-of-micr/