Sony hamstrung Minidisc by enforcing separation between audio and data. While the audio MDs became widely available and pretty cheap, the data MDs were rare an

Sony hamstrung Minidisc by enforcing separation between audio and data. While the audio MDs became widely available and pretty cheap, the data MDs were rare and expensive. It's largely the same reason standalone CD recorders failed in the market, while PC CD-R drives were wildly successful. It was a fast and durable format. If they had come out the parallel-port or IDE based drives which wrote on the same audio MD blanks in the mid-90s, it could have displaced floppy disks and remained the standard until multi-gigabyte thumb drives came along.