Historically, Sony's major solo formats seem to have alternated successful and failure--Umatic was a success, at least in the market it was intended for, then beta was a failure, then 3.5" floppy disks were a huge success, then memory stick flopped horribly, then blu-ray managed to somehow beat out hd-dvd
(Sony was involved with the creation of the CD and DVD formats but i'm not counting them because sony didn't do them alone, Philips and Panasonic did a lot of the engineering and marketing)
-F
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as noted in the aside there though, Sony's collaborative formats seem to do well for themselves pretty reliably. The CD-DA (aka audio CD), CD-ROM, and CD-R were unmitigated successes, the DVD and DVD-ROM were similarly massive successes
-F
