So today it was announced that outside of Sony, nobody really cares about its proprietary Universal Media Disc – UMD – which is used on Sony’s PlayStation Portable. (Details)
It was not too difficult for people to make the PSP play movies off the just-as-proprietary-but-at-least-under-your-control Memory Stick memory card. You just compress a DVD and save the file to the memory card. You then look for the movie on the memory stick and play it. So who the heck needed the stupid UMD which you cannot write to or read ANYWHERE other than the PSP?
Is Sony finally waking up to a world dominated by Samsung, LG and cheapo no-name manufacturers. People are not too keen on overpaying to get just the same quality, and worse off – be locked intoa proprietary technology. Apple, in my opinion, is not too far behind with closed formats (read iTunes) and a pricing model that hopefully someone will wake up to.
