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Sony Already Lost Media War to Apple?
Declan McCullagh writes "Sony's Walkman was the king of media players. Now Apple's iPod is, and Sony Connect was a flop. But Sony's problems may soon be even bigger: the company is having a remarkably difficult time coordinating software development across different divisions and continents, and some managers are worried that things may be getting worse. Will Apple's recent forays into the living room create even more of a problem for Sony?"
Sony is a player in almost every personal electronics market there is, with the possible exception of "massage wand" marital aids. They can afford to lag behind in one or two market segments for a few years and bounce back.
You can afford to behave as stupidly as Sony has for only so long in today's marketplace. If they don't split up their conglomerate into separate entities that can actually innovate and compete without interfering with each other, the market will do it for them.
Why not anymore?
Sony isn't the best at anything, and is overpriced at everything, but if you don't feel like doing any market research, buy a Sony and you will do okay.
- The Sony Cybershot is a pretty good camera.
- The Sony Receivers are feature-rich, support lots of inputs, and sound good.
- The Sony DVD player is a pretty good unit for $100 which plays most formats.
- The Sony car stereos work well, are reasonably powerful, and sound nice.
- The Sony laptops are slick little units which do a pretty good job of staving off "iBook envy" among Windows bigots.
- The Sony ear buds are actually a small step up from the iPod's offerings for only ten bucks.
- The Sony phase-cancelling headphones are a much better choice than the Bose ones you see pushed in most stores.
- The Sony cabinet speakers... are total crap, sure, but they're not really in the high-end speaker market.
The grandparent post is right. They've got a reputation for being "pretty good" in almost every market where they have a presense, and an easy brand to look for if you're a busy yuppy with no desire to study reviews and compare prices all day.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
"Did you know that with all the various products that Sony sells that the Playstation division is basically carrying the entire company?" ..and you can of course point to a source for this "fact".
f x2302512.html
This piece seems to suggest you're lying: http://www.forbes.com/home/feeds/afx/2005/10/27/a
Operating profit for Sony march-september 2005: 50.98 billion yen
Operating profit for Sony gaming division: 2.3 billion yen
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you like. - Mark Twain