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Dan Moren in a blog post on Mac User about Sony’s purchase of Grace Note writes:

“…if Sony follows its usual game plan, expect it to turn Gracenote into a qualitatively better but ultimately unsuccessful proprietary format.”

This is a pretty common misconception about Sony that’s been floated by gadget blogs and others in the technology press. However, it’s simply not true to say that much of what Sony invents turns out to be unsuccessful. I don’t blame Dan at all for the comment because for some reason this seems to be the general perception. But lets look at the facts.

The most well known perceived failure of a Sony format is undoubtedly that of betamax. The consumer format, although of a higher quality was ultimately killed by competition from VHS. VHS is considered to have won the war because it had a less strict licensing program and the format could record for longer duration. What people don’t realise however that there is more to this story. A professional version of Betamax, Betacam went on to become the dominant broadcast format, and its successors Digital Betacam and now HD-CAM are used in virtually every broadcast facility in the world. So while the original Betamax format may have been a failure, what it ultimately led to has netted millions if not billions of dollars for Sony over the years.

Lets take a look at some of Sony’s other formats.

There’s the Compact Disc which they co-developed with Philips. You could hardly consider it a failure. Then there’s Minidisc. While Minidisc never took off as a distribution format, as a playback and recording format it was very successful, at least until mp3 and the iPod became dominant. Minidisc is still one of the primary recording formats for jingles and commercials at Radio Stations around the world, having replaced the traditional cart system. It is also still widely used for field audio recording along with DAT (Digital Audio Tape, which Sony also invented) Incidentally, Sony’s ATRAC format, which gets a lot of grief for being a failed competitor to iTunes, was not a download format to begin with. It started as the compression standard used on Minidisc. So while ATRAC did fail as an online delivery format, it is unfair to blame ATRAC itself. It was Sony’s Connect Store that was a failure, not the format. Incidentally, both Minidisc and ATRAC were licensed to other companies.

Sony’s failure to capitalize on the music download market was an unfortunate shortsighted decision based on a management that had become too blinkered by protecting its many devisions. Sony paid for that mistake and the once proud Walkman brand was delegated to second place by the increasingly popular iPod. But that does not mean that the Walkman was never a success in the first place. Technology eventually moves on, and just because new technology replaces an old one that should not invalidate the success of the older one in the first place.

What else has Sony been responsible for?

A recent success for the company is Blu-Ray. Devised as a high definition replacement for DVD, Blu-Ray was developed by Sony, and has so far been successful and looks to grow that success considerably. Many people who had speculated that Blu-Ray would fail based their suspicions on nothing more than this very stereotype, that Sony’s formats are all doomed to failure.

The Playstation is another highly successful brand for Sony. It became synonymous with gaming for a decade, taking over Nintendo’s mantle. Nintendo may have returned to the forefront with the Wii, but the Playstation 3, which some consider to have had a rocky start seems to be gaining considerable traction, and is still a highly recognized brand. Sony also had a minor part in the development of DVD (After abandoning their own disk standard, they joined forces with Toshiba for a unified universal format which became DVD). Video 8 and Hi 8 Were highly successful camcorder formats in the Analogue era, both having been developed by Sony. In the digital era they developed consumer camcorder miniDV format, as well as the newer High Definition version, HDV. They invented the Trinitron, the first flat screen TV (The Tube - not the LCD or Plasma.) Sony and Philips also jointly developed the Sony-Philips digital interface format (S/PDIF) The format is used for transmission of digital audio used on virtually every audio device with a digital out (Including the Apple TV). Sony also invented the now defunct 3.5inch Floppy Disk, that was the primary disk format around the world for at least a decade.

It is often argued that Sony’s Memory stick format is not successful because there hasn’t been wide spread adoption of it by other companies, but the sheer number of Sony products that use memory stick alone and the volume at which they sell make the format a success. If the lack of third party adoption is your only measure of success then by that measure iTunes should be considered a massive failure.

The perceived lack of success of Sony’s UMD format is another misconception. The idea of movies on UMD was certainly a failure. It was doomed from the start because both the distributers and retailers jacked up the prices to ridiculous levels, where it was often more expensive to buy a poorer quality movie on UMD than it was to buy the DVD. Yet the disk format itself is used for the distribution of PSP games. The PSP has been a huge success so for its intended task, UMD has been reasonably successful, just not for movies.

Sony, like Apple in many ways has always been an innovator. It is constantly inventing products. Some of them succeed and some of them don’t, but at least they try. It doesn’t wait around for others to come up with something and then adopt it, it is out there pushing the boundaries of technology. Like I said earlier success and failure in the technology world comes in cycles. Sony has had some dramatic failures but also some great successes, but they never stand still. 

I have always had a great respect for the people at Sony, because they are not afraid to invent for the sake of inventing. I’m not saying that the management at Sony have not made some bad decisions over the years but what large corporation hasn’t. There was a time when IBM was king of the computing world and when the Apple II was the dominant personal computer. One of the world’s biggest Airlines used to be Pan-Am, one of the most popular formats for photography was the polaroid and the biggest name in video games was Atari. Sony has made its mistakes but it never stopped innovating. It always bounces back and the geniuses at the company always keep inventing.

The funny thing about formats is that only seem to be considered proprietary if they are unsuccessful. If a format is a success it’s considered a standard. And Sony have contributed more standards over their lifetime than any other company I know of.

(Source: Wikipedia)

[UPDATED to fix numerous typos]

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