Sony to Buy Gracenote

Ian Lamont writes "Sony is buying Gracenote for $260 million. Sony will use Gracenote's online music database in its own digital content and devices, but Gracenote will operate separately and keep its own management. It's an interesting move, because many other entertainment companies and services depend on the Gracenote database, including iTunes, Yahoo, Winamp, and even the onboard stereo system used in some new Cadillacs. Gracenote has been criticized for turning the once-open CDDB project into a 'quagmire of heavy contracts, licensing fees, forced user registration and anti-competition clauses.'"

Comments

freedb

[Gothmolly]

What is this CDDB you speak of? Some crufty, proprietary version of freedb? I'm sorry, how is this relevant again?

Re:You've Got It All Wrong!

[allcar]

Show me a technology where they did not try to seek to tie people into their proprietary solution - Betamax, Memory Stick, MiniDisc, UMD, BlueRay, to name just a few.

SONY Loves Closed, Proprietary Systems

[webword]

Sony's Obsession with Proprietary Formats -- "Obsessed with owning proprietary formats, Sony keeps picking fights. It keeps losing. And yet it keeps coming back for more, convinced that all it needs to do is push a bigger stack of chips to the center of the table."

Re:SONY Loves Closed, Proprietary Systems

[njfuzzy]

Losses like BluRay, you mean?

Re:SONY Loves Closed, Proprietary Systems

[Anonymous Coward]

Blue-ray's hardly a win, yet. Sure, they beat HD-DVD. Good for them.

Then prices on Blue-ray shot up (gee, who'd have ever expected that to happen), early adopters have discovered that their expensive players can't play new Blue-ray discs thanks to Sony continuing to muck with the spec, leaving the PS3 the only future-proof Blue-ray player.

But thanks to Sony purposely crippling the PS3 in order to try and leverage what they viewed as their console monopoly into winning the HD format war, they lost out to Nintendo and Microsoft. Every game release that has a PS3 version and an XBox360 version is better on the XBox360, without fail. Check the reviews.

As an added bonus to Sony, just when they were starting to get close to actually making money on the PS3, the US economy started to collapse. Since Sony is a Japanese company which is based in yen, the falling US dollar is causing them to lose even more on every US sale than they were before. The US won't be seeing a price cut until the dollar stops its nosedive. The way the US economy is going, Sony may have to actually increase prices.

They did manage to "win" the Blue-ray war. They won by losing their strength in the console market, and they won just in time to have the US economy collapse so that they can no longer count on sales there.

To top it all off, the war they "won" wasn't really worth winning. HDTV adoption is picking up, but it's still a trifling fraction of the viewing population. Blue-ray became more expensive. DVD is good enough: Blue-ray won a meaningless war, at a great cost for Sony.

Blue-ray's victory is meaningless.

Re:SONY Loves Closed, Proprietary Systems

[R2.0]

Yes, Sony finally won one of their format wars. Finally, after years of failing to achieve market dominance, they have a success.

Now what?

They have lots of experience making money with consumer electronics that leverage open formats - Walkman, Discman, and the metric assloads of VHS and DVD players they have sold. They have ZERO experience leveraging a market dominant position into profit.

Their attitude seems to have been "We make X dollars with Y percent of the market. So we will make X*(1/Y) dollars with 100% of the market." They ignore the case where the market with open standards is (1/Y) times BIGGER than the whole market with proprietary standards.

They are like the ass who goes out with the gang and always orders the personal pizza because they want it just the way they want, even though no one else wants it that way. He doesn't see that if he had pitched in he could have gotten a slice of the giant sized pie and still eaten more for less money than he paid for the pie that is "all his."

What about the mentalty of their customers ?

[Anonymous Coward]

People still buy Sony, even after they do all these things.

Re:You've Got It All Wrong!

[sm62704]

Sure they apologized

So did Kevin Mitnick, but he still went to prison. Why didn't anybody go to prison for XCP (alternate less serious link)?