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The five most pointless Sony products ever
April 24, 2009 7:00 AM PDT 
The five most pointless Sony products ever
We're huge fans of much of Sony's work. MiniDisc? Marvelous. PlayStation? Paradigm-shifting. Bravia? Boodiful. But it's made more than its fair share of absolute stinkers, so gather round. Crave UK has put together a list of the most pointless products in the company's decades-old portfolio. Starting with...
HiFD drives
"HiFD is destined to become the floppy disk of the 21st century," claimed Sony's Takayasu Hirano in 1998. And he was absolutely correct: in the 21st century, they're equally defunct.
Sony pioneered the 3.5-inch floppy drive in the 1980s. But by the late '90s, Sony needed a successor to its dying 1.4MB baby. It had become the magnetic equivalent of the once adorable son who subsequently tried to make a living playing the spoons when everyone else was buying drum kits.
Sony's answer was HiFD--the high-capacity successor to the 3.5-inch floppy. Announced in 1997 and first shipped in 1998, the first 150MB HiFDs were compatible only with Sony's HiFD drives. The problem was, the drives themselves suffered from technical hardware problems and Sony suspended shipments, although units were never recalled.
Fast-forward to 1999 and HiFD was re-released in an improved 200MB version. Their accompanying drives remained backward-compatible with the original 3.5-inch floppy disks, and this time functioned properly. They offered maximum read/write speeds of 3.6MBps and 1.2MBps respectively.
But it failed to make the format anything more than irrelevent--like Katy Perry, only less demented--as both Iomega's Zip drives and the CD-R had scored enough popularity points to steal Sony's limelight.
Ultimately, it was CD-R that triumphed, and DVD-R that continued the optical storage trend into the 21st century.
