It's hard to even guess what Sony is going to do, it's so big that neither hand knows what the other is doing. Given what the've done with the Clie in recent history, they don't seem to be too concerned with burning customer loyalty. For those who don't remember, early on in MiniDisc history, they did have a data-drive, with a SCSI connector, and specially-formatted MD-Data discs. They even had drivers for both PC and Mac, and a program that could play music through the drive, just like the early CD drives. It looked like a good thing, and given the low power requirements, it seemed like it would be right at home in a laptop. At the time, 140MB was a lot of storage, bigger than a lot of hard drives. 100 floppies worth of storage in a smaller, more durable format? It seems like a no-brainer. I knew it would never happen, though, when I saw Sony-branded Zip Disks. 1/3 less storage, 4 times the cost, bigger, bulkier, more delicate... I almost forgot about the click-of-death. Had MD-Data took off (other than in some small medical niches), they couldn't have made enough money on Zip disks to pay royalties to IOMega. Or maybe there was some sort of non-compete clause in the contract. Whatever the reason, MD-Data drives didn't get the production volumes to come down to a consumer-friendly price point, and got less press than Digital-8, the Sony 8MM Digital Audio format that could put 24 hours of audio on a single tape. Enough about DAT-killers, though. These days, we have the newly released PSP. The PlayStation Portable has the amazing new UMD disk, which sounds (and looks) an awful lot like a High-MD disc with the corners cut off. 1.4 GB of storage instead of 1GB... is that really enough justification for yet another media format? I don't know, but then, I'm not getting Sony's money for my thoughts. About the only thing I can see that UMD has going for it (from the point of view of a content-provider) is that there are not many things out there at this time that can write a UMD disk. And that means that there's not much out there that can write or copy PSP content, be it movies, games, or music. Perhaps that means we can all look forward to buying another copy of The White Album or Thriller, yet again. Greater minds than mine must be able to come up for a reason for avoiding their own technology, especially when there's a very easy to way to handle copy-detection. If prerecorded material were done using MD's CD-like stamped out disc mode, then an easy way to see if it were real would be to try and write to the disc. If you could, then it's not an original, and you could wipe out the copy at the same time! Perhaps that would be too easy. I can hope that I'm wrong, and that new and exciting MD-Data applications will be on the way, but I'm not going to hold my breath waiting...
