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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.'"
What is this CDDB you speak of? Some crufty, proprietary version of freedb? I'm sorry, how is this relevant again?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Walkman. Discman. Arguably both Sony's most successful consumer electronics products.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
Use MusicBrainz. All the cool kids are doing it!
Seriously. Musicbrainz was created after the CDDB fiasco (and FreeDB had its own share of problems). It operates under a non-profit organization to guarantee its freedom.
And on that feature bullet-point list, they add an API to recognize what that "Unknown Artist - Unknown Title.mp3" file you have.
Misleading titles? Inflammatory blurbs? Keep in mind that Slashdot is a tabloid.
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.