Slashdot Mirror
Why Sony is Ready to Self Destruct
jammmma writes "Before even launching the PS3, Sony is ready to self destruct." From the article: "PS3 is doomed, thanks to Sony's ignorant attitude. None of us had the chance to seriously evaluate PS3 and the experience it has to offer. It's impossible without a series of titles and an official product at hand, but from where we stand, Sony's damaging attitude is all it takes to diminish the value of PS3. Kutaragi may be right in defending PS3; after all, he can't criticize his own product, but instead of exciting users with valuable features and winning them over so they can start saving, Kutaragi makes bearish statements in response to Nintendo's announcement and Microsoft's take on Sony. Last I heard companies were at E3 to impress media personnel, which yielded positive publicity, not make childish remarks when chances were against them."
Sure Sony is run by a bunch of jackasses. Sure their PS3 product doesn't seem to match up to the current competition. Sure they're schizoid with regards to their music distribution, etc.
But they are not today, nor in the next 10 years, at all likely to "Self-destruct". This is a corporation, not a political party. They're not losing money at present, and if they pull off the PS3 thing well enough to set blu-ray as the new hd standard (who cares about the games?), their entire board of directors is going to spend the next decade snorting coke and gold dust off the asses of high priced prostitutes.
They're taking the long view in this situation, and I'll be surprised if we'll know how it worked out for a decade or more. The value of owning the dominant video standard cannot be overestimated.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=179036&c id=14837957
The problem with Sony is That the media division control the development division!
They can do thing that can eventualy and may be remove some little part of the profit of the media division !
So Sony will be in 5 (or lest) year a Media company only !(...)
Well if they don't change !
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
Sony's philosophy of overpricing takes a toll with other items as well. For example, I find their computers vastly overpriced, thanks to their short lifespan. Unless you are producing a truly superior product, you shouldn't charge premium prices.
On the other hand, I'd like to mention one Sony product I fell in love with. A long time ago, I got one of their early Sony Clie PDAs. This was at a time before Sony realized they had a gem on their hands. The retail price of the Clie was $99; I guess they were selling it only as a platform for their memory sticks. I'm still using it on a daily basis, and I got a replacement unit, just in case.
But, in the end, if they pick themselves up, dust themselves off, reset the retail price for the non-crippled P3 to something reasonable - as in, less than $500 US and less than 500 EUs - then they can still regain the market.
But they can't. Sony PS3 is so hightech (with their 3 cell processors and blue-ray) they are losing a lot of money selling at $599. I think the $499 version is so crimpled is because they know the buyers of this version arn't as likly to buy as many games, so they can't afford to sell a system that mearly cost them $100 less as they can't expect much game license recoup. In the end, Sony has two chances with the PS3.
1.) Market it as a computer alternative and include a full linux distrubtion.
2.) Drop a processor or two as the games being made right now don't even come close to using the full functionality.
I wont go as far as to say "SONY IS TEH DOOMED", but it doesnt look good for them in the slightest.
Actually, they'd be lucky if they could get up to Nintendo's position. Nintendo hasn't posted a yearly loss in the last 20 years, despite their "fall from grace", whereas Sony has been oscillating between profit and loss for the last several years, with quite a bit of time in the loss department. Nintendo might not be as popular, but they're far more successful in terms of profit.
MiniDisc licencees included:
JVC, Kenwood, Aiwa, Sharp, Denon, Alpine, Yamaha, Panasonic, Onkyo and Marantz.
Even granting that Aiwa is owned by Sony, I'd hardly call that "no one was offering the technology other than SONY."
Minidisc was cool, and I last recommended one to a woman who was doing anthropological field research in Africa. Why? The advantages of cassette (vs. an iPod, for example) with the ability to jack it directly to a computer through USB.
Next wave of MP3 player/recorders may make this redundant, but it was a decent solution at the time and that wasn't that long ago.
Skot Nelson music is my saviour / i was maimed by rock and roll
The low end PS3 (with no HDMI) may not display all blu-ray DVDs in HD. Once movie studios enable copy control on blu-ray discs, they will only display in HD from an HDMI port.
/ index.htm?section=money_latest
Sony have stated that they won't enable it because obviously they want the format to take off and for everyone to enjoy the full HD quality of blu-ray discs. It's also debatable who exactly is going to pirate films like resident evil if they haven't already done so. Sony Pictures blu-ray DVDs will play in HD but no other studio has commented on this yet:
http://money.cnn.com/2006/05/11/technology/e3_kaz
If you buy a PS3 at $499, then you get games and sony blu-ray DVDs in HD, but not necessarily other movie studio DVDs.
Considering that the MPAA and most studios take such a hard stance against piracy, I reckon they might just enable the copy control on their DVDs. Who exactly wants to buy a blu-ray player that'll only play Sony Pictures DVDs in HD?
"Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane." - H.P. Lovecraft
Then how do you explain the success of Dell in spite of virtually every tech enthusiast's constant railing against them?
I think a reorganization of the company is at hand with spin offs of non-profitables inevitable. For one thing, every division of Sony is clearly at odds with every other division. Numerous examples have already been stated above.
I would not be surprised to see a Re-Org happen as soon as July, but probably no later than December. If Sony is smart, they'll spin off their record company and get back to doing what they do best.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
It's even worse than that: the bulk of HDTVs now being sold are still going to early adopters, who are now UPGRADING their old HDTVs to new models, the majority of non-early adopter purchases are STILL SDTVs.
I can attest to that. I went on Friday. PS3 was plenty playable, it's just that no one really wanted to. There was no wait to get your hands on any of the PS3 demos. Meanwhile, as you mentioned, the line for the Wii wrapped around the entire west hall.
If forums teach us anything, it is that logic and critical thinking should be required courses in the public schools.
If there's one thing I've noticed with the "gaming market" is this. When you make something inexpensive or free, you attract a rather unsavory gamer. This is usually the kid with ADD who's parent's are sick of buying them the latest and greatest, or you get the crowd of people that don't put forth the effort to make something of themselves in life. This is the type of person that expects everything to be free. They want the world to revolve around them. I don't care to communicate with this crowd. I played in several Betas for games, Guildwars, and several games that were free. These attract the type of people I can't stand. As much as I hate it...I think I like the fact that the PS3 is more expensive. It will keep the brats away longer and I can enjoy my game without "l33t h4xx0r" users fudding my enjoyment.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
"Joke all you want at the small size of the 'tech' crowd, but enthusiasts hold a great deal of sway over the general public. If someone doesn't know which tv to buy, they'll ask their techie friend about what he/she recommends. And go into any electronics store(NOT best buy) and you'll see passionate people who won't recommend a POS."
You're joking, right? Maybe that's how it works in your inner circle of internet friends, but the tech crowd has little or no sway over the general public. Most people just buy whatever looks nice (ie, whichever one has a shinier box) or, more likely, whatever they think is "saving" them the most money. "Wow, $200 off this $1200 TV (that only cost $50 to make)! Now I can go out and buy $200 in lottery tickets! Yay!!!"
Yes, that is your situation.
But how many other parents are out there, middle to upper-middle class that also have several TVs and only 1 HDTV that acts as the primary (in the living room or their bedroom).
Then they buy junior an X-box/PS-3 - do they really want to hook it up to their single HDTV and have him hog it all the time? Or will just let him set it up to his (CRT) in his bedroom, and they don't care about BR because the discs cost too much and they just watch HD sattelite anyway:) Or junior just get tired to be restricted playing between 4 o'clock and 7 o'clock (or whatever) and move it to his room on his own accord^_^
BTW, will the PS3 have a connector to a computer monitor? Most monitors can easily have the required resolution, so I can it having much more market value that way.....
From the page:
I can tell you, from being at E3 all week, noone talked about PS3 and how great it was. In fact, noone really talked about it at all - except how expensive it was.
Whenever I talked to anyone, the conversation was either about Nintendo or the 360's games.
by Robert Summa on 05/14/06 02:59 PM
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
all the way back to Beta days. When it finally conceded defeat and released VHS decks
Conceded defeat? they never did that. Sony simply took the BetaMax and refined it to BetaCam and BetaCAM SP and owned the professional video market ever cince. Only now is sony losing it's fooding in the pro video market with the digital standard set up by JVC called MiniDV and DVCAM. Which is robust enough to handle the HD signals on the new HD camera systems.
Sony even tried to wedge in there with their own tiny digital camcorder tape. It died a horrible death just like SACD did.
In pro video Sony is still the defacto standard. Live events still use a DME9000 editing suite made by sony, most remote live semi-trailer studios are mostly sony gear as well still to this day.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This gives Sony them two choices
1. reduce their margins, which are already tight compared to the competition, and hope that their reserves can allow them to ride the wave of the mighty yen
2. hope that people outside the land of the rising sun will cough up the extra $ to buy their little toys (and this won't just affect PS3).
The fact is that the rising Yen and falling $ will give Micro$oft an edge in pricing both at home and on exports.
Price will be a big thing in the coming months, and exchange rates will have a lot to do with who comes out on top. Niether Nintendo or Sony have finalized their pricing, and I expect that they are hoping the Yen will fall between now and release date so that they can price lower.
Apparently you missed the thundering herd of people abandoning their PS3 plans in favor of Wii and Xbox 360.
:-)
Yup... that's what my friends are saying. They're going to buy a Wii AND a 360 for the same price as the PS3.
Me, I'll buy one if they come out with a Linux Kit like they did for the PS2 but that's only because I'm a total nerd
The Xbox used to be a moral quandry for me also... but I look at it this way. The Xbox keeps me from the temptation of booting windows to run games. It costs MS money to sell one to me. I have the ability to abstain from buying new games at least 90% of the time (sorry, I WILL buy Halo 3 the day it is released), so I don't contribute to their war chest any more than absolutely neccessary for my gaming habit (and no, don't tell me I can live without Halo.. not gonna happen). Actually I'm starting to find a comfortable spot with them as far as gaming goes. My actual quandry is unusual, because I was all about MS going down, but since they are having to actually compete in this market such that I do have a choice of toys to buy, it seems that they are doing many things better than the competition. My main happy point right now is that you won't be forced to buy an HD-DVD drive ala Sony and their attempt to shove Blu-Ray down everybodies throat.. especially since that is NOT a needed feature for playing games (most of the space on games nowdays is used to store pre-rendered cinematics.. now that we can render that all in real time, well, you do the math). In some ways MS have gained a smidgeon of respect back from me. Certainly not in thier PC products, but I certainly see the 360 as the lesser of 2 evils when compared to the PS3 (yes, in spite of my love for Linux). I truley don't want either console to fail, as the competition is great for the field, but Sony really needs to be taken down a couple of rungs. Seriously. So, in spite of my incredible anti-ms bias, I'm fully for the 360 over the PS3.
It bothers me greatly that it seems that some people are looking the other way just because Sony has decided to use Linux on the console. Don't let them buy you off with that bait.
It's a trick. Get an axe.
We have enough youth, how about a fountain of SMART?
Thats a fantastic summation of the events which lead to SWG's death. I quit SWG around the time that they discovered the secret to becoming a Jedi and im realy sad to see that its continue to fall into its proverbal void.
Realy makes you wonder what pond MMOG developers creep out of these days, and why on earth someone dosent give me there job =)
Parent post has it right with "disdain for customers". I bought one of their new walkmans for about $300 and the thing was a disaster. The only thing it had right was battery life. ATRAC was irrelevant, the software and method of connecting it to the computer were overly complex and required Windows. And as icing on the cake, the software didn't support Chinese language file names despite being purchased IN CHINA in the middle of their splashly product launch.
It worked for about two weeks before the screen broke after being placed in the same pocket I keep my mobile phone. So I ended up taking a morning off to haul the thing in to the Sony repair depot: the place you're supposed to go to get things fixed on-site. I would have loved to get it fixed elsewhere because it wouldn't actually have been necessary to waste an entire morning of my time if Sony authorized 3rd party repair shops, or even made their spare parts available, but Sony has a monopolistic repair policy, so it was a choice between crossing the city to find them or keeping their worthless hardward.
So I turn up at the repair depot which is covering the entire Beijing market... and end up dealing with someone who is both technically incompetent and customer hostile, which is to say that he seemed to consider lying to people his job description. At first he lied and said there were no spare parts in Beijing. Then he admitted they had the spare parts but couldn't fix it because their "repair guy" was backlogged and it would take several hours to open the casing, replace the screen, and close the casing. Finally he said their "service fee" was going to be about $100 USD, significantly more than the cost of getting my LDC screen replaced on my Fujitsu laptop (which managed to dissemble the computer, replace the screen, and reassemble the computer in about 20 minutes).
So as far as I'm concerned Sony can plummet to the depths of hell. If this is their attitude to the people who actually pay the premium price for their products screw them. I headed out to the computer district and bought a 2GB Chinese mp3 player for $40. The battery life is perfectly reasonable, the thing supports Chinese files names, it works like a regular USB drive and has no problem being stuffed in a pocket. It works like... uh.... a walkman should.
Screw Sony. I won't be dancing on their grave, but I might shovel a bit of dirt on it when I get the chance.
Agreed. The thing with Sony is that when their products aren't built to be absolutely unreliable pieces of shit (PS2), they're built to last. The Trinatron was the TV of choice amongst my friends in the Dreamcast days. And about the MD - while it tanked as a pre-recorded format (as has everything since the CD, for the basic reason that the CD does all that "most people" are looking for), as a way of making field recordings, it is second to none. It's cheaper and more portable than DAT, and the recordings sound better than microcassette (and at maximum compression, offer almost six times the recording capacity as one side of a C-90 microcassette tape - useful when one wishes to conduct a long biographical interview without the need to fiddle around to change tape sides). As someone who makes, ahem, field recordings* on the sly, there's something to be said for a recorder that will fit, unobtrusively, in a breast pocket. MD rocks.
That said (warning, from here on it's probably -1 Redundant), the PS2, while offering a superior library of games and DVD semi-functionality (the slow seek times doom it to a backup unit for me, but there are those who can bear to hold R2 for whole minutes at a time), is probably the most wretchedly fussy console since the good ol' ToasterNES. The DRM fiasco caused my former (tongue in cheek, I assure you) inner Sony fanboy to wither and die, and they really don't seem to have paid much attention to the last ten years of videogame history with the PS3:
Rule #1 - Nobody gives a shit about all-in-ones. c.f. the CDi. If a console happens to have DVD support, that's one thing (and with DVD support it was perfect timing, just as DVDs were beginning to take over the world), but for the most part, people don't care about web-functionality, home theater, or does-your-taxes.
Rule #2 - Nobody mentions Fight-- wait, sorry. Rule #2 - Nobody wants to pay more than $350 for a console. c.f. the Neo-Geo, the Sega Saturn, the aforementioned CDi, and of course, the 3DO. If adding Blu-Ray means your console has to be over the magic $350 line, then maybe you should consider toning it down a notch. Considering we haven't yet seen multiple DVD games (that I'm aware of), it seems to this armchair pundint that a DVD-ROM based console with some glitz (built in hard drive, USB, some fancy controllers, networking out of the box, etc) would be in throbbing demand, and the Blu-Ray console could come out if and when Blu-Ray becomes the Next Big (God forbiDRM) Thing, it could be seen as the budget-oriented gamer's Blu-Ray drive as well. But since budget-oriented folk don't tend to be early adopters, and early adopters would probably feel "safer" with a dedicated player, there really isn't much call for a Blu-Ray / game console.
Rule #3 - Most importantly, the benefits of being second at E3. Remember $299? Yeah. This is anything but.
Anyway. This said, I'm definitely a bit apprehensive about Sony, but given that the 360 is about as popular in Japan as the Manhatten Project, and the Wii is still, despite the bleatings of Nintendo fanboys to the contrary, coming across as more of a casual gamer "gimmick" system (not that that's a bad thing, oh wise and -1 Overrating Nintendo fanboy mods), it seems that Sony isn't totally out of the running. But what was shaping up to be a delightful slaughterfest (as all slaughterfests are - if I sound like a fanboy, it's only because Sony's won the last two rounds. Get me started on the late 80s and I'll sound like a super-gigantic Nintendo fanboy, I assure you) is now in extra-innings. I'd say the E3 showing was the Mookie Wilson groundball through the legs of Bill Buckner (now that we're all up-to-date on our World Series trivia
Another good piece of Sony engineering that evaded a death by hands of Sony's marketing is Trinitron CRTs. This was (and still is) the choice of DTP / photo-editing pros.
BTW, I feel really sorry for Sony's engineers: they often develop brilliant things that die undeservingly because of inadequate marketing, licensing, etc.
Computers make very fast, very accurate mistakes