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."

Comments

DUPE!

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

(Pink Panther Theme)

Dupe De-Dupe, De-Dupe-de-dupe-de Duuuuuuupe,
Dupe-eh de-Dupe!

Deja-vu

[voidptr]

So when do we get to see the article /. editor admits duplicate?

Re:Deja-vu

[pv2b]

Hey. You know that your comment is a dupe? (Original here.)

Big corporations

[cyriustek]

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.

Re:Big corporations

[antifoidulus]

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.

Re:Big corporations

[dourk]

Good thing Mits is also a bank!

I enjoyed reading this on /. last week....

[Osrin]

... I'm sure I'll enjoy the comments as much this time around.

Thanks for reposting.

And when will they get back to quality?

[Realistic_Dragon]

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.

Double Dupe!

[XanC]

We've also managed to dupe this one: Sony to Standardize UMD Format

I don't see how it's a mistake.

[glrotate]

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.

Re:I don't see how it's a mistake.

[dmaxwell]

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.

Re:I don't see how it's a mistake.

[illumin8]

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.

Re:I don't see how it's a mistake.

[WolfWithoutAClause]

It's a massive mistake, because the evidence that increased piracy actually doesn't seem to affect sales at all, if at all, and may even improve sales.

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.

Re:I don't see how it's a mistake.

[Sanity]

stolen material

Wow - stolen? That means the record companies don't have it any more - right? Can't they just get it off a P2P network like everyone else?

Re:I don't see how it's a mistake.

[salesgeek]

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.

MiniDisc Player having to replace

[failedlogic]

Dupe or not, I didn't comment last week so....

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 ... 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 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.

Dupe Spin

[Adrilla]

Hey /. editors. Do the PR thing and tell everyone it's not a dupe, It's the 'Best Of'. The Beatles and Elvis have been getting away with it for decades. Hell, that shithole of a network G4Techtv calls it 'retro'.

But does it...

[Doc Ruby]

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!

Sony has made more than one mistake

[MemoryDragon]

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.

Sony also owns music, y'know...

[AnriL]

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.