“Floppy disk RIP,” says Sony
by Pete Gerr on April 26, 2010
No, this isn’t a headline from 1999, though if you would have asked me to wager, I would have said the floppy’s fate was sealed around the turn of the century. “Damn you Internet! Damn you rich media!” Sony, who claims 70% of this mortally wounded market, stated this week that it would stop manufacturing and withdraw from the market it helped to create, by the end of March 2011. Start planning your retirement party now, Mr. CD! I was going to start this post with some wise crack like “Sony finds lost email from 2001, declares floppy disc dead,” but figured that’s just mean-spirited and arrogant. A decade is a lifetime in information age years, and perhaps I’ve just grown jaded living in the IT field for so long.
I just can’t, for the life of me, remember the last time I actually saw, received, emailed, or created a file that was 1.44MB or less. The average 3-minute MP3 song is 6-7MB for gosh sakes! I just created a Powerpoint presentation of 20 slides that’s nearly as big.
So the 3.5″ floppy becomes another mile-marker (tombstone?) on the storage market’s march up-and-to-the-right as capacities and file sizes increase and our appetite for information becomes more voracious. Sony blames “the wide spread of large-capacity storage devices,” like USB flash for the floppy’s demise, but CDs, DVDs or flash drives are just solutions to the problem the floppy didn’t adapt to address - the digitization of everything in our lives.
The rise of the internet, the shift to digital cameras, digital music players…digital everything, could have been an enormous opportunity for Sony who saw its shipments of floppies nosedive from 47 million units in 2002 to 12 million units in 2009 (who the HECK bought 12M floppy discs last year?!) Surely someone at Sony had to have seen this coming.
So how many years do CDs have left? Sony along with Phillips pioneered the Compact Disc around the same time as the 3.5″ floppy was broadly introduced, the early 1980s. While a standard CD can hold as much data as about 485 floppies, it too will eventually suffer the same fate. And if we continue our current pace of information creation, retention and sharing, we’ll be mourning the death of another dear friend, the CD, within 5 years time (IMHO of course).
Oh Mr. CD…your days are numbered!
