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There was an MD Data variant, and you could buy PC drives for it. It didn't last very long. The technical reason why MD Data never caught on is the same reason

There was an MD Data variant, and you could buy PC drives for it. It didn't last very long. The technical reason why MD Data never caught on is the same reason why Iomega Zip and all the other superfloppy formats failed: none of them beat the CD on storage density and media cost. By the time the market actually needed a successor to 1.44MB floppies, everyone also had internal hard drives, so a lot of the use of the floppy drive was to install software. The fact that CDs couldn't be written to (yet) didn't matter. The fact that they held 650MB made them mandatory equipment, while every other rewritable medium was just a luxury for professional users working with a lot of data. And CD-Rs and RWs killed that last niche, too, even though they were less convenient[0] than superfloppies were. [0] Writable optical media is a bit of a hack, necessitating processes like "mastering" and "finalization" to try and make the writable disc look like a regular disc to drives and players that aren't aware of the rewriting process.

giantrobot 9mo ago
> 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.
- mixmastamyk 9mo ago
  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.
  - giantrobot 9mo ago
    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.
    - hsbauauvhabzb 9mo ago
      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.
      - mixmastamyk 9mo ago
        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.
- wcfields 9mo ago
  Zip was fairly defacto RW media between ~1997-2004. I was in College around that time and the blue Mac G3's in most computer labs had Zip drives, and many PC's in the labs had Zip drives too.

giantrobot 9mo ago

> 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.

mixmastamyk 9mo ago
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.
- giantrobot 9mo ago
  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.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 9mo ago
    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.
    - mixmastamyk 9mo ago
      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.
wcfields 9mo ago
Zip was fairly defacto RW media between ~1997-2004. I was in College around that time and the blue Mac G3's in most computer labs had Zip drives, and many PC's in the labs had Zip drives too.