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Sony Admits MP3 Error
inflex writes "In a rare show admission of taking a wrong turn, Sony's officials have admitted that their stance on MP3 players was wrong." While this was pretty obvious to anyone who has ever shopped for a portable MP3 player, it is nice to see Sony admit their shortcoming. Ken Kutaragi puts it best when he says, "We're growing up," and with any luck future devices won't be crippled with silly formats no one uses.
"We're growing up," and with any luck future devices won't be crippled with silly formats no one uses.
:(
why did the end quotes have to be there
Sony admits MP3 error
Yuri Kageyama in Tokyo
January 21, 2005
SONY missed out on potential sales from MP3 players and other gadgets because it was overly proprietary about music and entertainment content, the head of the company's video-game unit said.
Ken Kutaragi, president of Sony Computer Entertainment, said he and other Sony employees had been frustrated for years with management's reluctance to introduce products like Apple's iPod, mainly because the Sony had music and movie units that were worried about content rights.
But Sony's divisions were finally beginning to work together and share a common agenda, Mr Kutaragi said at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Tokyo.
"It's just starting," he said. "We are growing up."
Sony officials have rarely publicly said the company's proprietary stance was mistaken.
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Mr Kutaragi, who has long been viewed as a candidate to lead Sony, was unusually direct in acknowledging Sony had made an error.
Sony's music players did not initially support MP3 files and only played Sony's own Atrac format.
Sony's technology innovation had been "diluted", Mr Kutaragi said
"We have to concentrate on our original nature - challenging and creating," he said.
Once the powerhouse of global electronics, with success exemplified by its Walkman, Sony has lost some of its glamour lately, losing out in profitability and market share to cheaper Asian rivals.
Mr Kutaragi - known as the "Father of the PlayStation" for making the game machine a pillar of Sony's business - said the new PSP, or PlayStation Portable, handheld will grow into a global platform for enjoying music and movies as well as games.
The Associated Press
give consumers what consumers want, not what you want consumers to want (to make the most money)
If I had to do it all over again, I would never have bought that MiniDisc player.
Alright, Sony, now let's talk about this Memory Stick...
What's your damage, Heather?
I hope it was choosing MP3 instead of the superior Xiphophorus Helleri Ogg Vorbis sound format. I am really sick of that unpronounceable "MP3"--seriously, what were they thinking?
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
"...and with any luck future devices won't be crippled with silly formats no one uses."
Sooo, no Ogg Vorbis players from Sony.
Zing!
Sony is about one of those companies seriously capable of making a real iPod killer.
iPods are by no means a superior product. it uses dated technology and lose out in terms of features and price to other players. What makes it sell is that it has the Apple brandname behind it.
I think Sony is about one of few competitors with the sort of brand that can compete if they get their act togather.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
Ken Kutaragi puts it best when he says, "We're growing up," and with any luck future devices won't be crippled with silly formats no one uses.
Growing up implies some sort of learning from ones experiences. Is this not the exact same situation as the Sony Betamax debacle? How about my Minidisc NT that broke trying to load my MP3s onto it. When are they going to grow up?
For that matter, Sony is doing it again with the PSP. Please, buy all the products you have bought in the past on our new media format. The irony of Universal Media Disk should not escape anyone. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me; fool me three times, realize me for a massive, faceless electronics and media company who has had a drop in overall product quality and customer care.
Yes, I know the main goal in business is to make money and grow, but to do that, you must serve the customer as well. At least, that used to be true.
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
And even when they did bring out players (Net Walkman NW-E95/99) which supposedly play MP3 natively (rather than the download software converting to Atrac), they require Windows(tm) software to download the MP3s to the player. None of the adverts, neither the online retailers nor the product description on the Sony site, mention the need for Windows. Linux can mount the flash as a USB storage device and can download files, but no way will the player play them.
I know parent will get modded up because he mentions the words "DRM", and any paranoid rant about DRM on /. gets modded up automatically, but WTF???
Sony was apologizing for not including MP3 support on their MP3 players(they only supported Altrac) not that they are getting rid of altrac. Oh, and in case you didn't actually know, iPods support MP3, so I'm not really even sure what basis in reality your post has. Oh, and AAC is open, just the DRM on Apples music store purchases(called fairplay) is not.
Please, RTFA and know what you are talking about before your next paranoid rant.
Thank you come again.
Monstar L
Devices are only crippled when they don't include formats that everybody wants. They can include all the formats in the world as long as they include the ubiquitous ones too. If they don't, then they are indeed crippled.
Before you read on, read this article by Steve Albini (one of the best known producers in the world) about the reality of the economics of the music industry. If anything it understates the degree to which the music industry is broken.
I'm a musician as are many of my friends. Musicians, or the vast majority of them anyway, do not make music to make money but to make music. Historically of course, it was ever thus. Before the means of recording music, there WAS no recording industry. The vast majority of great music in history was written without the RIAA's help and without the 'protection' of copyright. It didn't seem to bother Beethoven.
The small minority of professional musicians mostly make their money from live performances (cruise ships, bars etc). A small minority of the small minority of professional musicians make money from recording, but a large part of this is non-consumer oriented such as film soundtracks, game scores, stings, jingles, ads and so on.
The current inflection of the recorded music industry benefits only the major corporations and a few bands who have enough leverage to make deals that actually result in money. The vast majority of bands who record make little or no money.
If we were drowning in a sea of great music produced by the members of the RIAA I would be the first to defend them, but we aren't. We're drowning in garbage, and thousands of good bands languish unsigned and unproduced. You only have to watch American Idol to see how the process works.
Fortunately now the innards of a pro recording studio can reside on your home PC or Mac, and raison d'etre of the major studios no longer exists. Musicians can go back to doing what they have always done -- making music. Once the recording industry finally dies, those who make great music will earn lots of money from live performances and direct-pay-downloads spread by viral word-of-mouth.
If you think I'm wrong, consider this: poetry. Pretty much nobody makes any money out of poetry. But it still gets written. The same is true of music. The sooner the industry dies, the better.
I'm not wrong. You haven't thought about it hard enough.
That would be the Apple iPod that had MP3 from day 1, Mr Thicky.
Popular? Just because a lot of people are forced to use them does not mean they are "popular". Using this definition, traffic tickets are popular too!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
As storage becomes more plentiful and cheaper, the improved compression matters less and less, a 10% space savings on a 5 megabyte file doesn't seem worthwhile anymore. Even when scaled up to 50 Gigabyte collection 5 gigs doesn't matter so much if storage costs $0.50 / Gig. Meanwhile there is a standard which everyone accepted that works "well enough" for 97% of consumers, and supported by nearly every audio program and device - MP3. That last point is a sticking point, I'm not going to narrow down my available choices by 95% for one obscure codec, that's like voters that vote on a single issue and that issue only.
Now, I wish people would drop RAR. ZIP works fine and I hate having to dig up an unRAR program for the occasional oddity I might download.
Chicken and egg? It looks like everyone's pretty much agreed on MP3 as the standard universal compressed audio format. Like VHS, It's good *enough*, and even if it has IP and quality issues, they clearly aren't compelling enough to force seek alternatives because it works *everywhere*, which is what the digital music revolution is really about. (It used to be that app development stopped when the program could do email, now hardware development stops when you can play MP3s and take pictures - go figure!)
If MP3 were the only audio format out there, OGG might have more widespread acceptance as the 'free alternative', but with WMA, AAC, RM ATRAC (whatever) and the other formats that are available, **my** eyes start to glaze over, and I work with computers for a living!
I think OGG needs a sugardaddy -- a sponsor like Linux has with IBM -- someone with bucks that can really take ownership of pushing it into the marketplace by demonstrating its power and versatility. Sony has the position and clout to do that, but there's no way their music division would go for it.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Ken Kutaragi, president of Sony Computer Entertainment, said he and other Sony employees had been frustrated for years with management SCE are the Playstation people. The Playstation people say "Sony screwed up". The Walkman people are probably still creaming their pants over how nobody wants MP3 and would prefer ATRAC
Incorrect.
it uses dated technology and lose out in terms of features and price to other players.
Correct; by any and perhaps all of these means, there are a number of products definitely superior to the iPod.
However, if your means of comparison is file space per gram or per cc, it has few competitors; and if your means of comparison is based on quality of interface, the iPod is definitely superior to the competition. One need not use bleeding edge tech to create a superior product, you can simply put existing stuff together better than anyone else.
Apple does human-use engineering better than almost anyone else. I didn't find the cost worth the improved usability, and went with an Archos product. I also prefer a command line to a window; this may mark me as an uber-geek, but far more certainly marks me as a weirdo. (Of course, the fact that I refer to iPod users as "pod people" is more obvious evidence....) Most humans place a higher value over improved usability than on improvements to other features.
I think Sony is about one of few competitors with the sort of brand that can compete if they get their act togather.
With this, I agree completely.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Did anyone else notice how much stage time the President of Sony got during the Stevenote? Not only was he up there a loooong time but he was gushing like a little school girl in love. The Reality Distortion Field was on full blast and Steve had it pointing right at Sony's president.
I suspect there was much more that went on behind the scenes that week that will unfold over the course of the year.
Despite Steve's claim that this is the year of High Definition we all know that HD is not his focus.
How long has he been telling us that Apple doesn't want to make a $500 dollar Mac while secretly designing it for the past year?
How many times did he tell us that flash based MP3 players were a waste until he had one of his own?
How many times did he badmouth PDAs which he later admitted he had developed but decided not to ship?
My intuition tells me that one or more of the following will happen this year...
1) Sony will license FairPlay
2) Sony will start selling Sony banded iPods
3) Sony will make its own music player which uses the iPod OS
4) Sony and Apple will jointly develop new digital lifestyle products
5) Sony will become a Mac OS X licensee(eliminates the single source argument)
Huh? One is an incompatible format that made using Sony players an incredible chore. The other is a universally-accepted format that, while frowned upon, doesn't encrypt content (and it can very easily be avoided by using a multi-region DVD player).
I think the GP was referring to that Sony does not make any multi-region DVD players, and is just about the only manufacturer who doesn't. And for the very same reason Sony had for not making MP3 players: the interests of Sony's music and film products were allowed to take precedence over the interests of electronics consumers.
Yes! This is what we need to happen. Every time some company comes up with their own propietary DRM system, trying to corner an entire market, people need to not buy that product. Someone else comes along with a more open system and eats their lunch, and the company gains insight.
#define struct union