Sony's War On Makers, Hackers, and Innovators

ptorrone writes "MAKE Magazine takes a look at Sony's history of suing makers, hackers and innovators. Over the last decade Sony has been targeting legitimate innovation, hobbyists, and competition. From picking on people who want to program their robot dogs to dance to suing people who want to run their own software on something they bought. Sony has made so many mistakes with technology choices (Memory Stick, Magic Gate, UMD!), perhaps they'll end themselves soon enough, but until then MAKE is keeping score for Sony's all-out war on tinkerers."

Comments

Sony lost sight of its goal long ago...

[tekrat]

When it stopped being a pro & consumer electronics company, and started being a multimedia conglomerate.

Suddenly the folks running Columbia Pictures had a say in the board-room concerning what products would do and be capable of.

This is how we wound up with audio CDs that had root-kits on them, and MP3 players that didn't play MP3s. When Sony just made hardware, it was damn good hardware. Especially in the pro-area, stuff like BetacamSP was top-notch equipment.

But they lost their way, become too convoluted, too mired in internal politics and too many chefs spoiling the soup.

If they had *never* put their claws into all other media, and had just stayed a hardware company, Slashdotters would be singing their praises, and they'd probably be bigger than Apple.