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Father of PlayStation Admits Sony Mistakes
News for nerds writes "Following the news of Sony slashing its profit forecast due to the underperforming AV & PC divisions, Ken Kutaragi, president of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI) known by the PlayStation brand, admitted he and other Sony employees have been frustrated for years with management's reluctance to introduce products like Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod, mainly because Sony had music and movie units that were worried about content rights. The PSP by SCEI is one of the first Sony products that support non-proprietary standards such as MP3 or H.264, and now SCEI considers opening up the UMD disc format employed in the PSP."
The one where Sony admitted the mp3 error was regarding their digital music players such as the minidiscs or hard-drive based. This is why their latest hdd players (and future) supports mp3 playback and maybe other formats that are more "universal" than lets say ATRAC.
This article mentions the UMD format to be opened
"We have already proposed UMD disc media as an open standard for everyone," he says. "The game profile will be unique for PlayStation Portable but movie and music should be a common application for everyone."
Price fixing lawsuits were brought against Sony in Japan last year. Sony wouldn't allow any stores to mark down ANY Sony products without approval. Sony's defense was that people wanted to pay a higher price to know they were getting something good. Too bad Sony's consumer-level goods are shit.
Sega had decent products. In fact the Dreamcast has features that the others did not at the time and some still do not, like built in modems, network capability, VGA monitor hookup, external KB, mouse, advanced memory cards[1], vibration packs etc.. The Dreamcast could also browse the internet similar to WebTV over your choice of standard dialup or via the ethernet cable. You still can not do this with the PS2 or Xbox which I think is very odd. Maybe they are afraid that ability would cut into game sales or existing competeing services those companies offer. Basically, the Dreamcast offered much more for the end user but was basically dropped like a rock. Maybe it was poor marketing, maybe a little inside pressure and a juicy conspiracy theory with the other vendors.
[1] The memory cards had LCD screens, hooked together to transfer files between them, you could carry around the cards and play small cheesy games on the cards, used as a small suplemental information screens while playing the game, example being Sega 2K series football, you could allow play selection via the memory card screen preventing the other player seeing what play you selected.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Or perhaps a post about slashdot readers who admit to RTFA . .
correct me if im wrong but the last story was about sony turning tails on the mp3 issue and this is about the "father" of the Playstation talking about being frustrated at the uper management refusing to take risks
it just hapens to include some info that is a also in other storys
if the everyday press wern' to dupe parts of information in storys we would have some rather confusing bits of information
This is completely expectable - every time Sony electronics produces a gadget which plays a non-DRM music format (MP3 etc), someone in Sony Music starts screaming bloody murder. I know I saw a specific reference to this in an interview some time ago but it's lost to me now.
However, Sony has been producing MP3 players (walkman brand CD portables and also car stereos) for a number of years now - it's just that they are marketing them primarily as "ATRAC Walkman" which also happens to play MP3 as a side feature. The bundled crappy software produces ATRAC discs which suck large asteroids through thin straws (it has no ID3 for starters) and has no support for MP3 whatsoever. However, feed the discman with an MP3 data disc and it will play happily. The in-car stereo I have (a Sony CDX-R3300) is actually marketed as an MP3 car audio player.