Sony's Achilles Heel
I've read varying information about which standards Son'y new iPod competitor will support. Obviously, if it doesn't even support MP3, we can write it off. But even if it does, ATRAC is gonna kill Sony. Using ATRAC is a massive pain - it imposes huge costs on users. Now, if, as I understand,
all of Sony's new media players must encode any other format into ATRAC - ie, they only natively support ATRAC - Sony is dead, because this is where the costs arise: translating into ATRAC takes a quite a while.
Either way, Sony's ATRAC/MD game is a stupid one. To be discussed more in the near future - especially: why did Sony position MD as a music medium? I think this was a major error.