| MikeB said: @ Grey Acumen y'know, when bluray came out, people were talking about "oh, it'll be like betamax I find it funny that Sony and Philips' success stories far outweigh the disappointments. Sony had an enormous success introducing 3.5 inch diskettes for data storage. Philips had an enormous success introducing (music) cassettes (Compact cassette). Sony and Philips had an enormous success introducing the CD (Compact disc). Yet fanboys only drag betamax into discussions whenever a Blu-Ray topic comes up... |
First off, Sony's 3.5 inch diskette failed and was replaced by a similar format that had the support of multiple companies
Sony introduced their own small-format 90.0 mm × 94.0 mm disk, similar to the others but somewhat simpler in construction than the AmDisk. The first computer to use this format was Sony's SMC 70[15] of 1982. Other than Hewlett-Packard's HP-150 of 1983 and Sony's MSX computers that year, this format suffered from a similar fate as the other new formats: the 5¼-inch format simply had too much market share. A variant on the Sony design, introduced in 1982 by a large number of manufacturers was then rapidly adopted. By 1988 the 3½-inch was outselling the 5¼-inch
On top of that Sony's involvement with the CD format occured after the engineering was (mostly) completed, and they acted more like a marketing parter.
Finally, Betamax wasn't the only "failed" format Sony created ... Betamax, Minidisc, SACD, and UMD are a few of the well known examples
