Associated Press – July 29, 2006:
“Sony used to be a company that had superior technology and cool design and created products that other companies didn’t have,” said Akihiko Jojima, author of “Sony’s Sickness.””Sony has become merely a brand for brand’s sake.”
Sony has fallen behind Apple Computer Inc.’s iPod in portable digital music players: Sony has sold one-fifth as many players as the 58 million iPods that consumers have snapped up.
“As an outsider to the music industry, Apple acted extremely quickly,” according to the book “Sony Versus Sony.””Sony, which had its own music division, worried about possible damage to CD sales and could not act as quickly.”
“In the past Sony was overly confident that whatever it would make would sell,” he said. “Sony acted like it was a samurai king in business.”
Ah…Sony simply got too big of a company to keep up. Look at how many different divisions there are of Sony products. The lead execs lack the vision to push all the different products Sony offers ahead of the competition in their prospective market place.
Two more essential and interrelated factors — from personal experience with firms that made exactly the same mistakes:
1. You cut back on R&D when that was an essential part of how you made your reputation.
2. You not only sub out production; but, you start relying on your subcontractor for innovation. This is why Samsung is climbing while Sony is falling.
No
Sony, in addition to its technical stumbles,
is killing itself with the DRM stuff. Lemme
share a personal example. A couple weeks ago
I rented a Sony DVD from Hollywood Video and
when I attempted to play it on my completely legal
Linux Box it stumbled and froze. Two other boxes
including a completely legal Winblows XP box
also stumbled.
So I legally rented a Sony DVD, attempted to
legally play it on a legal computer then had
to illegally crack the thing to Play it.
I sent a complaint to Hollywood Video and
actually got a response. “Sorry, we ( Hollywood
Video ) can’t control the ( quality of ) product
we get from Sony.”
Wilcal
If Sony does some fot he following they might be able to:
Create a music store that sells tracks for $0.25 or less DRM Free in a highquality (preferably lossless) that will work on all the digital music players out there, or easily converted to play on them all. Their entire music library should be placed in this store, allong with any of their competitors who wish to sell through them also.
Restructure the corperaion placing a large portion of rev into R&D and quality control
Make a statment and live by it to never use DRM on any media they sell, though licence drm tech from others so that their devices can play other people’s drm. (I know apple will never licence theirs, but MSFT and others will)
Find ways to produce high quality, inovative products without crazy prices.
Then they might be able to
2 ways…
1. Fire all the lawyers.
2. Go back to the old Japanese model of manufacturing. Make a product, make it well, make it easy, make it high quality.
And for fun…
3) Get rid of the media division and become hardware / software exclusively.
I’ve used BitTorrent for a few things lately.
My buddy suggested that if I’m using BitTorrent, that I should run a program called “PeerGuardian”. I installed it. The program is sort of a basic firewall that uses a database to block very specific IP addresses. When it blocks traffic, it tells you who the traffic belonged to. Approximately 1/3 of the traffic blocked over the course of 1 day was from Sony. I wasn’t downloading music or movies. The rest of the blocked traffic was primarily various Chinese entities. Um, I’m not Chinese, either, nor do I frequent Chinese websites.
What I was looking for were episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Why is Sony and/or the Chinese so interested in these shows?
I’d highly recommend PeerGuardian to all of you, whether you’re using BitTorrent or not. You’ll probably be very surprised how many questionable entities are scanning your system.
Have a great day, and stay cool!
#7
Or you can just spend the $30 on a router. A spam is a spam is a spam.
From computers to DVD players to iPods to every electric gizmajig that we use to play media… …what is that? Maybe a 900 gajillion buck a year business? Something obscene, as I recall.
Movies? Music? They are big business, but a fraction of hardware, and many media creators are owned whole or in part by the larger hardware empires. Maybe… Just maybe… The brass at the top needs to send a memo to the media biz. It could say, “Listen bitches. We own you and we are amazingly bigger than you. Quit screwing around. You are nothing more than the serfs who make stuff to play on our hardware. You can be replaced.”
9 “Listen bitches. We own you and we are amazingly bigger than you. Quit screwing around. You are nothing more than the serfs who make stuff to play on our hardware. You can be replaced.”
Sadly, Sony tried that with Blu-ray in their fight against HD-DVD.
People were thinking it would be a “slam dunk” with Sony owning/controlling 3 movie studios, and getting a few more to sign-on…
But instead, it turned into a bidding war – with the two hardware camps offering more & more DRM features to woo content providers as the most “secure” format.
Then Sony announces a PS3 without an HDMI output – which cannot play HDCP-protected movies… and announces it won’t be releasing any HDCP-protected movies [for now]… so some of that extra DRM may not be used for years.
Maybe it’s just me, but with a few exceptions, I’ve had very bad luck with Sony products, going back to the early 1980s. Tape decks that died 3 days after the warranty was up, CD players that did about the same while the no-name replacement lasted 10 years, television sets that just never worked right, etc.
Once upon a time, Sony stood for strudy, well designed and competently manufactured products. Just when they stopped it hard to tell.
But Sony also has had a problem of, like Apple, sticking with expensive, propriety formats, that while they may be somewhat better than the mainstream, are incompabable and therefore loosers in the market. Betamax is the prime example, but Minidisc and a few others that were even less successful come to mind.
Then, they got into the content business, buying up what used to be MGM pictures and Columbia records. Not their forte.
As for me, there are only a very few Sony brand products that I will buy, and with the death of the Cassette tape and therefore the Walkman, none of them have any moving parts. It is down to blank media and headphones. Oh, and maybe the odd CD or movie if what I want happens to be on their label.
The company has to go back to making reliable products with wide appeal.
Dave
The only thing Sony are good at making anymore are TV’s, and they charge double what they are worth.
I can’t think of anything I’d buy that is Sony… except the SonyErricsson phones, and really thats not so true anymore – because you can tell its more Sony influenced than ever.. so now the quality and designs just suck (they USED to be great).
I think Sony’s content-creation divisions have played a hand in crippling innovation in their hardware division. so paranoid about people copying their movies that they make UMD write-only, for example, and make it a huge pain to get video onto a PSP, which would be a great PMP otherwise.
Yup…. in Sony’s case, it is the tail wagging the dog. It is ironic that their solution to their Betamax failure has turned out to be doing more damage than good.
After Betamax lost to VHS, Sony got on the merger/conglomerate/syngery bandwagon and bought product production companies. They bought into the music and film industry,
However, the parinoia in those industries has only given Sony headaches and have hamstrung their hardware development. I used to love Sony products and at one time I would not have minded paying a premium for them.
These days, I do not even consider them. They limited themselves to expensive, inferior, and DRM heavy-handed content. Their products are not as innovative as they used to be.
Bottom lime… they lost it. They need to either get into the hardware biz, or the content biz. Doing both half-ass isn’t getting them anywhere.
Ever since the rootkit incident, I decided to not buy anything from Sony whatsoever. I wasn’t even a victim, but it’s a matter of principle. It’s sad as Sony did make very high quality products.
Maybe it’s just me, but with a few exceptions, I’ve had very bad luck with Sony products, going back to the early 1980s. Tape decks that died 3 days after the warranty was up
It’s not just you. I had the exact same on my Sorry cassette, plus an AM/FM/PSB radio that lost tuning (! yep.. it detuned within a few days of the warranty expiration), and my currnt Sorry Vaio Laptop – which spent most of the extended warranty either going to, coming from, or being ‘repaired’ at GEZWM.
Thus, the change from SoNy to SoRRy.
J/P=?
Last cool Sony product was a dvd player wih a round form and small footprint.
Sony used to be the best at making what people wanted, even if those people didn’t know they wanted it initially: Tiny TVs, Walkman, Trinitrons, etc. Now the problem is clear. They don’t make what people want (like PSPs that will conveniently play a compressed movie from a DVD). They are in active conflict with their customers. That can only point them in one direction – down. The prognosis is bad since they are now headed by a movie exec. I am sure there are hundreds of great engineers with lots of cool ideas dying on the vine in that company. They are itching to build the next cool thing, but are instead told to go work on DRM.