Most of the time their standard is superior however the whole world does not live in Tokyo. In general consumers don t like to spend more money on products that do roughly the same as their competitors. They will save money wherever they can and so by trying to create standards Sony always fails. The only exception, which seems to be gaining ground, is the Memory stick. The memory stick is a key chain sized device, which is used for storage in some Sony products.
All standards seem to have merits and disadvantages like bandwidth, capacity and features.
Compact flash seems to have the best options as a standard because it has a form factor, which allows more than just storage. Memory Stick has also adopted this idea. Instead of using the interface for just storage we saw a dizzying array of memory stick products. There were GPS, digital camera, mp3, storage, wireless, blue tooth and other implementations. Paired up with their new palm based PDA, this would offer seemingly limitless features.