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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.
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.
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!
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make install -not war
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