I'm not a huge fan of electronics that try to further themselves by going against the flow.  For example, I mistakenly thought that Apple's iPod only played Apple's brand of compressed audio.  This made me mad.  What a great way to restrict people to only using your own brand of stuff and deny the use of industry standards like WAV and MP3.  But I was wrong.  This isn't the case.  But the idea still made me mad.  This is the case with stuff like Sony cameras and laptops, which use Sony MemorySticks.  I think this is dumb.  Why did Sony need to create a new format to store information?  Probably to make more money.  They make this little plastic thing that holds a simple little chip, and sell it for 500% markup.  I'm a bigger fan of people like Canon and Palm, who use Secure Digital (SD/MMC) storage.  Sure, they put out their own brand of this storage, but you can get the same thing from other manufacturers for much cheaper.  It's the same idea as making things that are incompatible or are in competition with Microsoft products.  Sure, Microsoft is a big, mean, emotionless machine.  But too bad.  It's not gonna change.  Instead, people should make things that make Microsoft products better. #technology