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

Deja-vu

[voidptr]

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

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.

Double Dupe!

[XanC]

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

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.

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.