James: To Hell with your Proprietary format!

[James]

Hey guys, we're thinking of doing a video about times in history when a company's attempt to use a proprietary format FAILED. For example, Sony used to have slots for Sony Memory Sticks instead of SD cards. Eventually, SD won so much market share that Sony incorporated SD into its products and all but abandoned Memory Stick. 

 

We're looking for similar examples of times big companies who tried to screw consumers with a proprietary, locked-in format and got smacked by the free market

 

NOTE!! examples must meet these criteria!

• the format cannot be superior to the one that killed it 
• the format must be wholly owned (or driven by) ONE company, not a consortium of like 16 companies (unless it gets beaten by open source I guess)
• the format war can't be between two companies (eg Betamax (Sony) vs VHS (JVC))

 

Thanks folks!

[Fasauceome]

Linus has already mentioned SATA express on the channel before, it may have a place here

[TetraSky]

Was firewire proprietary to Apple before it got kicked to the curb by USB?

[RobFRaschke]

Your requirements actually narrow this down a LOT. USB is a consortium that beat out a proprietary connector, firewire, so that doesn't meet your requirements. BetaMax vs VHS is a major one though, it's basically the epitome of proprietary media that's better, losing because it's expensive. The irony there is that BluRay beat HD-DVD because it was proprietary and has stronger copy protection.

 

Laserdisk is possibly a good example, as it wasn't bad at all, except in size.

 

Zip Disks I think might be the only one that meets all your criteria. It was a decent medium, with decent storage space and decent speed, right up till recordable optical media came out and it has met a really, really slow end. I actually know some people who still have and use them for legacy data.

[James]

4 minutes ago, RobFRaschke said:

Your requirements actually narrow this down a LOT. USB is a consortium that beat out a proprietary connector, firewire, so that doesn't meet your requirements.

 

It's ok if the winner is a consortium. In the case of Memory Stick, Sony lost to the SD Association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SD_Association

[RobFRaschke]

1 minute ago, James said:

 

It's ok if the winner is a consortium. In the case of Memory Stick, Sony lost to the SD Association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SD_Association

Ok, then as best I can recall, aside from your example.

 

USB over Firewire

USB over Lightning(MacBook and iPad wins, if we count thunderbolt as USB 4)

CD-R/RW over ZipDisk

 

DVD over Laserdisk(not really competitor as much as a sucessor to be completely honest.)

 

 

With the flip side being proprietary beating consortium

HD-DVD losing to BluRay

[RobFRaschke]

1 minute ago, Genwyn said:

RED minimags

charging thousands for cheap SSDs and claiming its all special

 

though i know you have red cameras and you might not want to piss them off, but it might be beneficial for the market as a whole if larger media outlets started talking about that nonsense

Despite having third party options available, there isn't really an alternative format that's taken its place as far as I'm aware. Now if someone came out with an adapter that allowed a completely non-proprietary storage medium, like a direct SATA adapter so you can throw an 870 Evo on it, that would be a smackdown in earnest.

[RobFRaschke]

Just now, Genwyn said:

if we're talking video formats, an old one would be VHS vs Betamax

That was excluded in the first post because it was literally one company beating another, because JVC made it cheaper, not better and that's all people cared about then. Home video was still very new, and BetaMax actually had a massive following in television recording for many years aver JVC won the home market.

[James]

3 minutes ago, RobFRaschke said:

That was excluded in the first post because it was literally one company beating another, because JVC made it cheaper, not better and that's all people cared about then. Home video was still very new, and BetaMax actually had a massive following in television recording for many years aver JVC won the home market.

Betamax players were also huge and very heavy

 

 

[RobFRaschke]

1 hour ago, Genwyn said:

there is, its called the jinnimag

http://jinnimag.com/

the issue is the asshole who reverse engineered the things is charging insane prices too, not as bad, but 950 UK pounds for a 1tb SSD is insane

somewhere out there one can probably find the prints for the adapter board, inside is just an m.2 ssd

That's a third party, also proprietary, copy of the original, not a true alternative option though.

 

1 hour ago, James said:

Betamax players were also huge and very heavy

I think the one on the left is one of the ones I have, hang on, I'm going to go get a picture of it.

The faux wood one is gone, I forgot it died. I do still have a functional Sony BetaMax player.

[Radium_Angel]

Another Sony hit, the MiniDisc

 

Also DAT (Digital Audio Tape)

WMV files

RealPlayer

VideoCD

[Shreyas1]

windows 10 store maybe? or just games on windows store ( I'm not talking about Xbox app, gamepass is great )?

 

Edit: not really failed yet, but epic games store and the massive backlash they've received might qualify.

[jake9000]

Dreamcast wanted to use its secret sauce GD-ROM format, which was just a slightly better CD. The playstation 2 on the other hand used standard DVDs which had a much better data capacity, and also meant that it could do double duty as a DVD player. Pricing the PS2 at around the same price as standalone DVD players made it a compelling product, and a success they tried to replicate with the PS3's bluray player later on. 

 

That awesome time Microsoft decided we needed a Flash 2.0 and rolled out Silverlight. 

 

Google Chrome was founded solely on having a 40x faster javascript renderer and nothing else. We were stuck with browsers being crappy due to trying to support decades of legacy garbage up until the Chrome lads bet we would be willing to dumpster the lot of it if we could go fast. Fun bonus story, youtube dropping support for IE6 was an unauthorized dark horse project led by a small group of employees.

 

[krakkpott]

How about Itanium vs x86-64?

[Noctus]

1 hour ago, RobFRaschke said:

CD-R/RW over ZipDisk

I still have ZipDisks lol

[lewdicrous]

I wonder if the proprietary charging every phone had back in the day is gonna make the cut.

[AndreiArgeanu]

Do any of these count? I mean I remember back in the day when smartphones weren't really a thing and each phone had a proprietary connector but then it all got beaten by the almighty micro usb.

Or proprietary motherboards from manufacturers like dell or hp? 

[harryk]

- CurrentC was a proprietary mobile payment system made by the MCX consortium which was vocally against Apple Pay. The member companies were bound against accepting any other form of mobile payment, until one by one they left the consortium and began accepting Apple Pay.

- On the same note, Walmart Pay.

- Everyone knows the story of Adobe Flash. Whether or not this is obsolescence or displacement by HTML5 is up for debate.

- DIVX was a short lived video format used on discs with players both only sold by Circuit City. The idea was one-way video rental. The discs would 'expire' after an allotted time.

- ATRAC audio codec made by Sony for use in their own players, though it was licensed on a small scale. It had some real advantages over other popular codecs.

- Many languages and web implementations in the browser wars were at least secretive if not proprietary.

- Maybe a little old, but film formats. In hindsight there are/were only a couple of truly widely used film formats, most popularly 135. Numerous competing formats failed to catch on.

- I'm failing to remember any specific cases atm, but there are plenty of stories of proprietary malarkey in the car world.

 

You may also be interest in perusing this Wikipedia article which has a list of format wars.

[D13H4RD]

3 hours ago, RobFRaschke said:

That was excluded in the first post because it was literally one company beating another, because JVC made it cheaper, not better and that's all people cared about then. Home video was still very new, and BetaMax actually had a massive following in television recording for many years aver JVC won the home market.

That was only part of the reason why VHS won the format war. The lower cost was just a side effect of JVC licensing out the standard to companies like Panasonic and RCA, which in turn meant that more VHS recorders were out on the market, which caused economies of scale to do its thing.

 

One of the core reasons why VHS eventually won out was due to its ability to record for much longer. RCA would make this a key selling point on their VCRs. Sony screwed up there, as they thought too much about size and made the Beta tapes significantly smaller than their VHS counterparts, meaning that they can store much less content than an equivalent VHS tape, so much so that Sony actually abandoned Beta I (which was deemed to be the best when it came to outright quality), only releasing Beta II and III after 1979 in an effort to better compete against VHS.

 

There was also Sony's arrogance and general cluelessness when it came to the general market and what they wanted, especially when it came to timers, where one Sony exec once mentioned that the reason why they didn't include timers was because "it could be used for other purposes" and that because not everyone "needed a timer", they weren't "forced into buying one". Wow.

 

Also, here's an interesting tidbit. Remember the Digital Versatile Disc (DVD)? That was actually born out of 2 would-be competing standards, which were Sony/Philips' MultiMedia Compact Disc (MMCD) and the Super Density Disc, backed by Time Warner, Matsushita, Hitachi, Pioneer, Thomson, JVC, Mitsubishi and Toshiba (and yes, that was where the SD logo for the SD card came from). The reason why they were consolidated into DVD? Computer manufacturers sent a message telling these parties that only one standard would be accepted and if it didn't come to fruition, that both SD and MMCD would be boycotted. 

[PlayStation 2]

2 minutes ago, D13H4RD said:

That was only part of the reason why VHS won the format war. The lower cost was just a side effect of JVC licensing out the standard to companies like Panasonic and RCA, which in turn meant that more VHS recorders were out on the market, which caused economies of scale to do its thing.

 

One of the core reasons why VHS eventually won out was due to its ability to record for much longer. RCA would make this a key selling point on their VCRs. Sony screwed up there, as they thought too much about size and made the Beta tapes significantly smaller than their VHS counterparts, meaning that they can store much less content than an equivalent VHS tape, so much so that Sony actually abandoned Beta I (which was deemed to be the best when it came to outright quality), only releasing Beta II and III after 1979 in an effort to better compete against VHS.

 

There was also Sony's arrogance and general cluelessness when it came to the general market and what they wanted, especially when it came to timers, where one Sony exec once mentioned that the reason why they didn't include timers was because "it could be used for other purposes" and that because not everyone "needed a timer", they weren't "forced into buying one". Wow.

Not to mention whatever party tricks that Betamax had up their sleeves, Victor did about as well as Sony with them.

Picture-based fast forward is one of them, but the one I love to note the best is Beta Hi-Fi vs. VHS Hi-Fi; Beta Hi-Fi came out in 1984 and VHS Hi-Fi came out about a year later and they work about the same: store high-quality frequency modulated audio in the video track. Both did it in about the same way, which could be said for a lot of features that Sony tried to push out of the Beta machines, which meant that Betamax was a format with a bunch of party tricks and genuine features that VHS also had but had its own set of downsides.

It should be noted that Betamax movies came out until, around 1990? Some companies (Paramount, namely) took cost cutting to a whole 'nother level and simply used the VHS boxes or would just slap a sticker on them noting that they were Betamax tapes and just updating shit on the back to accommodate. Here's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, a title that had about eight separate releases in 1990.

[D13H4RD]

6 minutes ago, Dan Castellaneta said:

snip

Precisely. Sony's numerous screwups in the beginning meant that they were already in a relatively weak position to counter, especially since whenever they came out with stuff like BetaScan and Super-Beta, JVC and its partners would already have responded soon after with similar features, negating Sony's advantage entirely.

 

There was also the Betamovie, Sony's attempt to create an actual all-in-one camcorder with an integrated Beta VCR. It was actually a heap of genius engineering all inside one relatively compact box, except that said engineering crippled the camcorder, especially in how it is incapable of playing back its own recordings. And then JVC came out with the fantastically-named VideoMovie, with the much smaller VHS-C format.

[PlayStation 2]

Just now, D13H4RD said:

Precisely. Sony's numerous screwups in the beginning meant that they were already in a relatively weak position to counter, especially since whenever they came out with stuff like BetaScan and Super-Beta, JVC and its partners would already have responded soon after with similar features, negating Sony's advantage entirely.

 

There was also the Betamovie, Sony's attempt to create an actual all-in-one camcorder with an integrated Beta VCR. It was actually a heap of genius engineering all inside one relatively compact box, except that said engineering crippled the camcorder, especially in how it is incapable of playing back its own recordings. And the JVC came out with the fantastically-named VideoMovie, with the much smaller VHS-C format.

Betamovie is bizarre. It's also why I appreciate the amount of effort Sony poured into it despite being a pretty shitty device.

Here's one for the ages: Video8 movies. I wanna say most of the Hollywood studios had releases (again, Paramount actually did quite a number up until around 1996 or 1997, and they play almost exactly like their VHS counterparts) on Video8. Which would be cool but when Sony tried pushing the format as a home movie format, it kinda didn't work, to put it charitably.

[D13H4RD]

6 minutes ago, Dan Castellaneta said:

Betamovie is bizarre. It's also why I appreciate the amount of effort Sony poured into it despite being a pretty shitty device.

Here's one for the ages: Video8 movies. I wanna say most of the Hollywood studios had releases (again, Paramount actually did quite a number up until around 1996 or 1997, and they play almost exactly like their VHS counterparts) on Video8. Which would be cool but when Sony tried pushing the format as a home movie format, it kinda didn't work, to put it charitably.

Betamovie has a soft-spot for me despite it being quite shitty for its intended purpose. This wasn't much of a rushed device made to be pushed out the door quickly. They actually put some actual thought into the engineering of it. Too bad they didn't really think about playback on the device itself.

 

I generally respect failed formats that actually put some effort into resolving issues that would later be replicated down the line. They may have failed but their efforts certainly weren't wasted. Too bad I can't say the same for the Huawei NM card, which I can say are basically microSD cards shaped like nanoSIM cards, only proprietary and with the price tag to match. Literally the only advantage they have over an equivalent microSD is that they are smaller. Cool, but it didn't really translate much to other benefits.

 

Ironically, Huawei claimed that they are offering the NM card to others for free if they so wish. Only problem? SD exists and it's been just fine for years.

[FlappyBoobs]

How about the LS-120 drive (Imation Superdisk). It was a format designed to replace the floppy drive, but it came out 3 years AFTER the zip disk that everyone already had, except with this version the only company that sold the LS-120 disks was also Imation and they were hella expensive compared to Zip Disks. 

 

 

 

 

[Guest]

7 hours ago, RobFRaschke said:

Ok, then as best I can recall, aside from your example.

 

USB over Firewire

USB over Lightning(MacBook and iPad wins, if we count thunderbolt as USB 4)

CD-R/RW over ZipDisk

 

DVD over Laserdisk(not really competitor as much as a sucessor to be completely honest.)

 

 

With the flip side being proprietary beating consortium

HD-DVD losing to BluRay

Firewire was a different standard than USB. It used a separate chip. I'd consider it a huge success, especially in cameras. I believe Firewire 800 was more proprietary than Firewire 400, 400 was much more popular. (and anyway FireWire was superior to USB, even 2.0, then maybe 3.0 with firewire 800 in terms of sustained speeds). 

 

To OP (great name btw) I'd probably say quicktime video. You'd only need it on a Mac, and even then it's superseded. Maybe used on educational videos for PC's but you'd still need quicktime. 

 

Or a real movie player file. Gosh those were awful. 

 

For a connector, I'd probably say Apple Display Connector (ADC) (c. 2000). which combined monitor display, USB, and monitor power. That probably is a prime example, although not explicitly a format. (seems better than normal DVI, but was not ubiquitous - was swapped out for normal DVI, the major connector at the time, both were incompatible).