> The technical reason why MD Data never caught on is the same reason why Iomega Zip and all the other superfloppy formats failed
I wouldn't say Zip didn't catch on, there were a few years where Zip drives were pretty ubiquitous. MD Data had a price problem. The drives were expensive ($500+) and the disks were nearly $30 IIRC. Meanwhile a Zip drives and disks were half that or less.
On the whole they just did not offer enough storage over competitors to justify their price. When CD writers got cheap they were better in almost every way.
Yes, even if Sony had competed the window of relevance was short. But they were always attached to premium pricing, without the product focus Apple later developed.
Sony's always had a very weird obsession with proprietary storage media. I think they resent the licensing model of CD-ROMs (essentially none) and desperately wanted formats they owned and could license out. At the same time their entertainment division would want to hamstring those formats with onerous limitations or DRM.
The end result was Sony always seemed so schizophrenic with storage formats. They'd come out with a format that looked cool on paper but then have some artificial limitation (including stupid prices) that made it unattractive.
It looks dumb because it didn’t work out, but in some alternate universe Sony has more money than Apple and Microsoft combined thanks to a monopolised data format.
It wasn’t just bad luck, it was a failed strategy all along when the tech industry was growing exponentially. That open, cheaper alternatives would undercut them was/is a given.
I wouldn't say Zip didn't catch on, there were a few years where Zip drives were pretty ubiquitous. MD Data had a price problem. The drives were expensive ($500+) and the disks were nearly $30 IIRC. Meanwhile a Zip drives and disks were half that or less.
On the whole they just did not offer enough storage over competitors to justify their price. When CD writers got cheap they were better in almost every way.