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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."
I think it's exemplary that Mr Yamashita decided that the PSP needed MP3 support. I think SCEIO could go a lot further by making the Playstation infrastrucure open source!
I have some great gaming ideas and would like to release them under the Playstation since emerging markets like Peru, Ghana, and Tuvalu still have the original PS as the main console.
Which is nice.
Broken Sony junk:
Walkman.
PS.
PS One
PS 2.
Clie (which was a present for my brother).
Surround amp.
None of which was abused. I'll reconsider buying things from them when the stop making cheap shit that doesn't work. They have had, and squandered, plenty of chances from me.
Beep beep.
Heh, it's an even bigger problem in Japan. For years, Japan has had a torrid love affair with the big companies, the bigger it got, the better. The companies would develop relationships with other companies that even governed what kind of beer their employees should drink. However, the companies got(and still are) way too big for their own good, and made every product you can think of. The beucracy and red tape puts makes the US government look efficient by comparison. This led to a lot of stagnation and now Japan is finally coming to realize that small, focused companies aren't really that bad.
For example, Mitsubishi manufactures everything from LCD monitors to trains to escalators, to motor vehicles. Not surprisingly, one of the groups(Mistubishi Motors) is now in a lot of financial trouble.
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.
Dupe or not, I didn't comment last week so....
... no go. The worst thing is, is that Real Player was the easiest sofrware to use to update the MiniDisc player. If it weren't for RP, I probably wouldn't have used it (and taken it back). RP update servers seem to be down now, so I can't get the drivers for it.
I have a NetMD Minidisc player. I can apprecaite that Sony wants to enforce copyright, etc for its music units. As far as the box advertised 2 years ago, their OpenMG or SonicStage software was supposed to be really easy to use. So I bought a MiniDisc player. Having a RIO PMP 300 previsously, it was an improvment in capacity, quality and battery usage (it lasts much longer on a AA battery).
Having lost my original software disc (2 years ago), I've tried upgrading to newer software (SonicStage 2.0). I've tried for 20 minutes to upload songs to it -- importing music libararies
I warn everyone who thinks of buying Sony, that they use many proprietary formats (the memory stick in cameras, etc). Sony has probably lost many sales from my peers (business and friends alike) as a result. Unless they clean up their act, I cannot recommend them, good as their products might be.
Sony's desire to get royalties for their royalties, creating their own proprietary media when the market offers better alternatives is one of the reasons I own no Sony products.
When Sony announced the PSP, I was sold. A game system, portable video player, music player, PDA...the works. It seemed great. Then they announced I'd pretty much have to buy the shit I already own on their proprietary bullshit UMD format. If I already bought "Lost in Translation" on DVD and want to watch it on the road, I'm not going to drop another $15 for a UMD version.
Sony deserves to be bled dry, because maybe they'll realize it's better to sell much more products with less exclusivity than half as many and try and bilk every penny you can.
"Although I am not a proponent of government breaking up companies, I must say there are times it is actually good for the companies."
What says government has to be the one to break up companies? I did very well as a stockholder when Sears spun off Dean Witter, Discover Card and Allstate Insurance. More companies should take that lead and spin off big or unrelated business units. Sure the CEOs might end up with less power under one roof, but that can ultimately be the best thing for investors. GE and GM might be good candidates for that type of thing, especially GE. And everyone following technology knows that Xerox missed out big time by not wanting to introduce new technology to compete with itself.
Companies that become too big have more to lose so they often become risk averse, which is why it is important to find the right balance.
Sony has made more than one mistake in the past. I know several people who really could afford anything who bought basically Sony only but will never buy Sony for the forseeable future.
The reasons are various. First of all, thanks to Sony Media lots of their stuff is crippled, Region Codes which are hardest to remove from any manufacturer, no decent two way transport of media files in almost any of their devices. The obscure Atrac conversion in their MP3 players, lousy quality of their PCs and add to that at least here in Europe one of the worst customer services ever in existence, combined with repair costs which are higher than a new device from another company, and you can see why Sony has a bigger problem than they admit on their hands.
Also add to that that their retailers are totally frustrated because, they were taken away the support business (which was done in the past by the retailers themselves in many cases) and the profit margins even of the high end devices are close to zero, driving the smaller shops away from Sony.
The Support problem started when Sony centralized all support, before Sony had this kind of luxury structure Apple still has with small shops who do all the small stuff and have good personal, Sony wanted it big and basically drove those shops away trying to cash in on a centralized structure. Add to that constant problems caused by Sony media which resulted in catastrophicly castrated devices and lots of problems which often caused Sony hardware to fail shortly after the warranty expired and you have a huge mess on its hand.
The playstation basically saved the Sony hardware division without it this division would have made huge losses already. Sony really has a problem, but it is far bigger than only a few mp3 player models which they have missed out.
Your comment it is exact.
To add some information, one can say that the Magic Gate commands are related to automatic executing of code, intended as a way to replace outdated BIOSes parts with new drivers, etc. The Magic Gate "protection" it is trivial to break with a high resolution data analyzer, the way: monitorize the DVD remote control driver upload to the memory card. Anyway, using it commercially without Sony approval will drive you directly to the jail.
With Sony PC and AV sales slumping, and their movies selling more than ever, with their music failing less badly than much of their (sparse) competition, Sony will surely move towards free/cheap HW, subsidized by draconian DRM on their media products. They might be opening some of their HW and formats, but only to universalize their platforms, so more of their media can be controlled.
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make install -not war
until I arrived at a local electronics store and noticed a pile of returned Sony NetMD players sitting in the discount bin. Against my better judgement, I bought one and I am still sorry for doing so.
As a MiniDisc player, the unit was great will exceptional battery life and great sound quality. When I attempted to use the NetMD functions of the unit, the reason for so many returns became obvious, mainly to do with the absolutely atrocious software that is used to transfer MP3 or WMA files to the unit (as many are aware, the NetMD players convert MP3s or WMA files to Atrac before uploading to the MD player). It took nothing less than a miracle to find a way around the nearly useless software after Googling for a while, but I did. If I hadn't found the Simpleburner/Nero work-around to Sonicstage, I would have returned the unit just like the other dozen players sitting in the return bin.
From my own experiences, I think simple economics and word of mouth had the most impact on Sony's decision. After all, if your biggest competitor and market leader, Ipod, is not forcing MP3 copy restrictions on their player, how do you expect your model to work?
Opening up UMD has no value other than allowing PCs to write to UMD-Rs or UMD-RWs for their PSPs. Nobody is going to be interested in a 1.8GB format like this when DVD writers have just gone dual-layer (8.5GB) and blu-ray is around the corner.
It's just another oddball optical format. If they start selling movies in this format it's not going to take off. How many people are going to want to buy movies in two formats just so they can play them on their PSP? They are going to just want to rip their DVDs to DIVX and burn UMDs for their PSP.
In fact, they now have these "Mini-DVDs" with kids movies coming out for miniature portable DVD players like the Cyberhome CH-MDP2500.
The world does not need any more optical formats for prerecorded movies (or music for that matter).
Notice how Sony's latest digital cameras, starting with the F828, have both MemoryStick and CompactFlash slots that can even harbor microdrives.
In the same product line, now the RAW files are more accessible.
Estamos como estamos porquè somos como somos.