I don't think it's a good comparison for several reasons. 1) Those technologies were already not as heavily used when they were dropped. There are still tons of traditional headphones being manufactured and sold, even years after phones have started dropping them. 2) It's easy to leave an external drive at a desk for occasional use, it's much less convenient to carry a dongle everywhere since you likely want to use headphones on-the-go. 3) This is subjective, but floppy to cd-rom is clearly an upgrade, wireless to wired headphones is not. It adds syncing and battery life problems to an otherwise simple technology.