Standards, and how one company can ruin my life

If you’re visiting this site because you’re a bonafide fan of the web, you probably know just how important standards are to our little internet. Standards are important to all kinds of other things too. Take pedals in cars, for instance. What if cars in Canada had the gas on the left and the brake on the right? Americans would be crashing up everywhere north of the border and Canadians would never get anywhere.

On that note, why is it that whenever you go go-karting, they tell you to use your right foot for the gas and your left foot for the brake? Why can’t I use my right foot for both?

The matter of standards brings me to the following company: Sony. Now don’t get me wrong. The stuff that Sony makes is usually pretty quality — their line of TVs, their gaming consoles, their portable computers — to name a few. But in the good sweet lord’s divine name, what is with Sony and inventing their own standard for everything?

The following is a list of Sony-proprietary formats, or technologies in which Sony played a major role in developing and pushing:

• The ATRAC audio codec
• Betamax
• Blu-ray disc
• MemoryStick
• Minidisc
• Universal Media Disc (UMD)

The latest offender? TransferJet, an alternative to wireless USB. Now, after reading more about the technology, TransferJet and W-USB aren’t exactly equal in form nor function. But please, Sony, how many more of your products must I rule out from purchasing because you use a proprietary format that locks me out of using equipment I already own with them?