2011 will be the year the floppy disc goes extinct. Sony, which sold 47 million of the 3.5-inch discs a year at its height, is phasing them out in Japan, one of the last markets. According to the Examiner, sales fell to only 8.5 million in 2009.
Sony’s sales of floppies worldwide ended in March of this year. Sales in Japan will end next year exactly a year later. Most worldwide manufacturers of floppies already put the kibosh on the little devils.
Other more popular, and capacious, media for information storage and transmission, including USB drives, DVDs and CDs and online, the demand for the discs has severely declined. Added to that the fact that few computer makers are even including disc drives, there’s just no compelling reason to keep investing in them.
I wonder what we’ll do, a decade hence, when we unearth a mysteriously-labeled floppy and find no way to read it? Maybe some things are better left as mysteries.
