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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."
This is an example of what happens when companies turn into huge conglomerates. Eventually, you have competing interest and a piece of the business loses a major opporuntiy to grow further due to anoth business unit. Although I am not a proponent of government breaking up companies, I must say there are times it is actually good for the companies.
from what I read about japan when a japanese person describes themselves as "frustrated" with a situation what they mean is "I AM GOD DAMN FUCKING PISSED OFF AND YOU ARE GOING TO DIE!" ...
I was kind of amazed when the sony mp3 products suddenly turned up and now considering opening up the format for the drive?
Me thinks some corporate bloodletting has been going on.
Well, shit! How unfortunate! I can't use my MP3 player for CDs I purchased, because it's the piracy standard of choice!
Hey, I hear that a lot of pirated movies come in DivX format! Lets make sure no media player can play that, maybe that will stop the flow! And then, since most pirated games come in iso format, lets outlaw nero! Because I clearly never want to make a backup of something that I purchased under fair use!
Repeat after me: The technology standard is not the problem, the views and actions of a group of people are the problem.
I missed the previosu story on this so this point may have been brought up already.
What about their memory sticks and the the iLink (although really 1394)? I'm sure there are others that Sony has used. They figure if you use their "standard", there is a chance for lockin and you will buy or licence their other products as well. Their digital cameras could easy be designed to work with CF, SM, XD, or SD etc but they force you to use their sticks (which are just as expensive as XD) because they can. Playing the lockin business model is catch 22 though, you need the market share to achieve effective lockin and lockin helps maintain and grow market share. Obviously their music formats never made it to critical mass but it was not a complete failure either as it did stay around for quite a few years. I wonder if the memory sticks will suffer the same fate in the future.
It's a huge mistake because Sony's consumer electronics business is much much larger than Sony's content business. Other posters have pointed that overly large conglomerates can have conflicts of interest with themselves. Realistically as the larger and more profitable business, Sony Electronics needs to tell Sony Content to go f*ck itself. Even better would be if Sony divested itself of the content arm at a profit and turned the electronics divisions loose to make products people actually want.
Well, Sony did provide software to convert MP3s to UMD, so I don't see what your is. Not supporting MP3 on the device just made Sony's offerings a lot less convient if you are using MP3. Oh, and a lot of people did rip CDs they bought to MP3, it's a hell of a lot more convient that searching through your collection for the cd you want.
Monstar L
The emergence of MP3 players has been built on the availability of terrabytes of stolen material being circulated. Is it in Sony's best interest to implicitly support this movement through the introduction of MP3 devices that will undoubtably be used to play, and encourag further dissemination of, pirated Sony content? I don't think it's an easy question to answer, and I can understand Sony's hesitancy.
That may or may not be true. I'm sure in some ways the popularity of the iPod has to do with filesharing, but in a lot of other ways, it's just about how people like to enjoy their music. A lot of people I know have an iPod that have never stolen any music or used Kazaa. They just like being able to rip their CDs, chuck them in a storage closet somewhere, and carry their whole music library in the palm of their hand.
If Sony wants to join the market, they will admit their mistakes and uncripple their devices. The marketplace has spoken. Crippled, proprietary formats do not sell and the more they try to cram them down our throats, the more people will just buy an iPod that plays MP3 and AAC.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
It's not clear why this would be, but there are suggestions that essentially there has been piracy ever since home taping in general and cassettes in particular hit the market- people have been copying off of friends ever since.
Now, you could argue that this is wrong, and that the artists and music companies are worse off because of this. But music companies are making good money, and stopping the home copying would be a double-edged sword, since the home copying acts as free advertising. In addition, it's very unclear that the lack of home copying would increase sales- many people, particularly young people are on a budget, and simply wouldn't buy more music, they would just listen to less music and spend no more money.
Also, except for the most hardened copier listening to music usually creates a taste for music- so they end up buying more music in the long run.
So, home copying doesn't seem to reduce the market size for selling music. On the other hand, real pirates- people making copies of music and selling them for money, or even as legitimate forgeries, they really can reduce the market size.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"The PS2 was the first console to run Linux "out of the box". Sony opened the PS2 a little with PS2 Linux, an open Linux distro that runs on PS2 HW. It was apparently a strategy by Sony to get official game developers started on something programmable, but cheaper than the dedicated HW dev system. But it's in a cage: it doesn't run on the actual HW (instead, a kind of HAL that emulates the HW on the HW itself), and the OS must boot on a firmly DRM'ed DVD. And Sony prohibits the distribution of PS2L SW (apps, drivers, etc) on discs, so a LiveCD that boots into your wicked port of NetHack could never compete with their latest NBA licensed blockbuster. Maybe now that they're opening the UMD, they'll open the Magic Gate to Linux on PS{2,3}. That could put cheap, powerful, consumer-stable grade multimedia HW (subsidized by gamers) under the control of Linux programmers, who could target a market of millions of potentially Interneted consoles. That would really steal the thunder (and developers, developers, developers, developers) from Xbox - go, Sony, go!
--
make install -not war
This isn't interesting at all. The emergence of MP3 players has been built on the convience of having ones music collection at the tip of their fingers. Instead of walking about with tapes and cd's. You simply go from Bach to N.E.R.D with the touch of the Next button.
Sonys mishaps have been their own based on their contesting to own "media". To put everything in their own proprietary, undocumented and closed formats.
As for the "terrabytes of stolen material". Theives will be theives, it doesn't stop honest abiding customers from purchasing product and never has.
To date, the RIAA nor the MPAA has been able to prove this. Nor has anyone else for that matter. What happened when dvd's came to advent? The thieves just went from tape to dvd, before that it was 8 track and vinyl. So on and so on.
Technology is supposed to make an area in your life more convienent. For music it's been my ipod. Does Sony have an equivalent? No. Have they failed and lost business because of this? Yes.
It's up to them and their management to decide if they continue to fail or if they want to try something new. Something that doesn't fail.
The emergence of MP3 players has been built on the availability of terrabytes of stolen material being circulated.
This is bull. First, MP3 players were successful because they were simple and open. Convert audio to MP3, download, press play. Utilities are simple file level tools. No DRM validation that doesn't work right. No encryption. No chance that in 10 years I can't listen to my collection of fine Pantera music.
Sony made some of the most complicated uncompatible junk ever. SONY SHOULD KNOW BETTER: Beta, Minidisk, that bizarre DAT format they tried and memory stick have been dismal failures (unless you ask the marketing department for the product). Sony's open products such as 3.5" floppy drives (they were one of the original sources), Mavica Cameras (that used floppy disks when everyone else was using early and expensive flash cards), CD ROM, 8MM Video have all been wildly successful. Consumers like stuff that works.
-- $G
I can apprecaite that Sony wants to enforce copyright, etc for its music units.
While I appreciate this, you don't have to buy a device that restricts your rights in order to protect their overbroad definition of their rights.
-- $G
Some of Sony's stylish computers do look very nice, but then they should be as they are now more expensive than similar equipment produced by Apple (just compare the prices of their laptops and slimline monitor solutions and you will see what I mean). This says a lot about Sony's computers at the moment, yes they look nice, but they are still PCs after all, and Dell can produce something similar at a lower cost. Apple's computers not only look good, but actually work better by not using Windows. Sony have a choice, learn either from Dell or Apple, or stick to making Playstations that allow you to play games.
It's not stealing. It's Cultural Exchange.
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni