He promised in August 2022 to do away with floppy disks and CDs in communication with authorities, and in January this year introduced new legislation to promote regulatory reform, as Computerworld’s sister publication Computerwoche reported. Until recently there were about 1,900 regulatory procedures in Japan that required companies to submit additional data in the form of floppy disks or CD-ROMs, Computerwoche said.
By the middle of last month the agency had “scrapped all 1,034 regulations governing their use, except for one environmental structure related to vehicle recycling,” Reuters reported, and now that too is gone.
Dwindling market
And not before time: It’s over 14 years since Sony, one of a handful of companies still selling floppy disks in Japan, said it would halt floppy disk sales in 2011 due to dwindling demand. In 2009, Sony had a 70% share of the Japanese domestic floppy disk market, which amounted to about 12 million disks in total — with a combined capacity of just 17 terabytes.