Don't know if I'd put the Walkman first, but it does show how Sony has managed to screw away a commanding position in that segment of the market. I owned nothing but Walkmans for years during the cassette tape era. They were generally the best around. Now, they throw away the utility of their portable players by forcing the user to use propriatary encoding to transfer any data to the device. I'm sure, in their minds, they are 'forced' to protect content now that they are a producer of it. Sony has been hobbling some very clever devices for years now, quite sad.
Of course, I guess one only need look at Betamax and then Memory Stick and realize they hadn't really learned anything in the intervening decades about opening up media in order to win a format battle. Others notable failures come to mind as well, such as the MiniDisc. Perhaps such triumphs as the Walkman and Trinitron were merely flukes.
