There are basically two kinds of technology companies

September 7th, 2008 - 12:10:05 PM:

Very often Sony is criticized for using technology that is sometimes different from what the competition uses. In discussions like these, it doesn't take long before Sony is pictured as an evil empire. This is my take on this.

There are basically two kinds of technology companies. The first kind invents and develops new technology, either when there is no existing standard, or when existing standards are deemed inadequate. Some of this new technology is adopted by the industry and becomes an industry standard, and sometimes even a formal standard. But not all of the new technology is successful and may not find widespread use. So there's a risk for these companies to invest money in a technology that in the end may fail. But when it turns out to be successful, there's the incentive of becoming market leader. As a rule of thumb, if you are first on the market, you can grab 60% of the market short- to mid-term, and you can keep 40% market share long-term. Furthermore, you can get a large share of the market when the prices and profits are still high, before the technology becomes a commodity product and prices fall.

The other kind of companies does not take the risk to develop their own technology. They wait until one standard is established and has spread throughout the industry. Then they jump on the bandwagon and release their own products using established technology. These companies do not risk money lost in development, but they also never have the chance to become market leader.

So when one company has created many failed standards in the past, you will find – when looking closer – it also often has created many successful standards. This is just a sign that the company is active developing new standards. It's pushing technology rather than just following it.

Sony is one of the former companies. Many people dwell on their failed or not so successful technologies, like Minidisc, Betamax etc., but overlook their successful technologies, like Walkman, Compact Disc, Trinitron and – as it looks now – Blu-ray. Also many people like to dismiss their standards as “proprietary”, while overlooking that competing standards are just as proprietary, meaning that they are not an official standard or were only made an official standard after the fact. For example, many like to call Memory Stick “proprietary” and SD Card “standard”. This is simply wrong. SD Card was an invention of SanDisk and Infineon and was developed “into the blue” just like all the other flash memory formats. By the way, SD Card is also another example that a dominating standard is not necessarily better technology. Just look at how MMC and SD are unnecessarily incompatible, and why it was necessary to change the standard – incompatible, of course – to support cards larger than 4 GB. It's similar with CompactFlash, an invention of SanDisk, based on PCMCIA (later called PC-Card), which is again based on IDE. Lots of proprietary technology there.

In the end, most of these discussions boil down to brand wars. Technology is bad when it's invented by Sony, and it's good when invented by someone else. This does not help anybody.

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Readers' comments

#1: Comment posted by Dave Gannon on September 26th, 2008 - 03:01:36 PM:

I agree with this. I also think that a brand that succeeds doesn't necessarily do so through being the "best of breed". I personally find my minidisc far more usable than my mp3 player (both Sony by the way) but in different ways - ability to edit directly on the player, and straightforward input from a CD player being 2 firm favourites on the minidisc.

However, it's also interesting to note how some of the less successful technology has gone on to pave the way for better products - look at laserdisc and DVD.

#2: Comment posted by Steve S. on October 7th, 2008 - 02:28:17 AM:

While I agree in large part, I can also point to some disagreements. Let's take the memory card issue...

What technical/price/etc advantages does Sony's MS format offer over SD or CF cards? Is there any real difference, any real technical innovation, etc? It may... but I don't know of any.

Who makes units that take Sony MS, besides Sony? Is there ANY reason for any of them to do so?

So in the end is there any reason for me, as a consumer, to buy MS... except to use it in Sony products where MS is the ONLY option?

Wouldn't it be better for me, as a consumer, to be able to buy fewer kinds of memory cards and use them as-desired in any/all of my devices, at MY choice?

In the end, I object to Sony's MS / MS-Pro format because I see nothing except Sony's desire to own the proprietary (= $license-fees) bits of technology, without bringing anything to the table; compare SD and CF which *do* have differentiating advantages, and reasons to prefer one or the other based on the merits of SD vs. CF formats (as witness the ubiquity of SD in the inexpensive arena, and CF in the pro arena).

That said, I have nothing but applause for Sony in putting out dual MS/CF dSLR's. Serving their existing camera users (who are, no doubt, heavily invested in MS/MSPro cards!) by not rendering their media obsolete is a very fine move.

Regarding "Betamax" & "Blu-ray" -- I bemoan Betamax as a "shoulda-been" since it was (mostly) superior to the competition; I cheer the victory of Blu-ray as (mostly) superior to HD-DVD (at about the same price).

- Steve

Michael Hohner answers:

These are exactly the misconceptions that I'm talking about. The common prejudice is "Sony is trying to lock people into inferior technology and squeeze license money out of them". So let's compare MS and SD:

1. MS is not free, yes. But SD is not free, either! To get full access to specifications you have to buy a license from the SD Association.

2. From the beginning, SD/MMC had a 2/4 GB size limit. To overcome the limit, they had to change the standard, and now SD-HC cards do not work in older SD devices. You can't even use only 2 GB of a larger SD-HC card in an SD device. Earlier, when SD replaced MMC, the SD standard was also not backward compatible with MMC, so you could not use SD cards in MMC devices, even when not using the new SD features. The two standards were 99% compatible, but that last 1% of incompatibility broke it. Having personally developed software to support SD and MMC, the only words I have for these changes are "unnecessary and stupid".

MS does not have these compatibility issues. So MS is indeed superior to SD in this respect, and Sony is bringing something to the table. MS today also supports much higher speeds than SD, making MS better suited for high-bandwidth devices like cameras than SD.

3. Both MS and SD share the same advantages compared to CF: smaller size, more robust connector with fewer contacts (read: cheaper to make and less likely to break).

#3: Comment posted by Alexander Bezrukov on July 10th, 2009 - 02:34:31 PM:

Mike,

I am far from considering Sony an empire of evil although I believe Sony could get more loyal customers if changed some of its policies (compromising security by (secretly) installing malware on its customers' computer, as just one example, is not just a matter of winning or failing technology).

When people say that one standard is proprietary and another is open, they don't mean -- as you wrote -- that the standard is not official. They mean that the standard is unpublished and thus restricting broader community (including loyal customers) from its use for their benefit or the standard is theoretically available but for an unreasonable amount of money that an average person or even company can't pay or it is otherwise available to selected entities only. This is done in order to bind people to certain software or hardware products even if these are not adequate for customer's needs. Example is aforementioned rainbow books. esp. the "Orange book" -- the CD standard by Sony and Philips which has for a long time been available only for larger entities not just for everyone. Another one is aforementioned "Memory Stick specification". If you need a copy (e.g. for creating a driver for your own OS or for fixing a bug in existing one), you're supposed to pass through the following procedure: https://www.oss-formats.org/en/memorystick/license/license.html. Difference with the SD memory card standard is that you can simply download the needed files from sdcard.org.

Michael Hohner answers:
Please note that the public version of the SD specification is incomplete, and that you still have to become a (paying) SD Association member to get the full specification and be allowed to release actual products.