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You've probably seen the Sony commercial on TV lately with Macy Gray singing Aerosmith's "Walk this Way." I really like the song, but watching Macy Gray sing and move the way she does, frankly scares me. It's ironic how Sony named their first hard-drive based digital music player the "Network Walkman". Walkman goes back to the 80's when Sony dominated the portable music market. Unfortunately for them, this player is about four years late to the market. The likes of Apple, Creative, iRiver, and others are dominating the digital music market today. Not only is the Network Walkman a latecomer to the market, but like most things Sony, it is proprietary. The player only plays music in Sony's proprietary ATRAC format. So, if you want to transfer your huge collection of MP3s to it, it has to convert them using Sony's software. Not only does this make transferring take a lot longer, but converting already compressed music into another compressed format makes the music sound worse. This makes the player doomed before even coming to market, especially considering that people that have 20 gigs of digital music most likely didn't get all that music legally and like the "openness" of technology. Not only that, but the ATRAC file format isn't going to play well with other devices, especially if you're into streaming music over a home network.
Sony just doesn't get it. Going proprietary just handcuffs consumers and we as consumers want freedom to do what we want with our technology, be it music or not. It looks like the Network Walkman is going to go the way of the Betamax player and MiniDisc format.
