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Sony In Talks To Buy Ericsson Out of Phone Venture
PolygamousRanchKid sends in this excerpt from a Reuters report:
"Sony Corp is in talks to buy out Ericsson's stake in their mobile phone joint venture, a source said, in a bid to catch up with rivals. The move could help Sony recoup ground in the battle against Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics, where it has been hampered by its disparate offerings of mobile gadgets and online content. The joint venture, formed in 2001, thrived after its breakthroughs with Walkman music phones and Cybershot cameraphones, both of which leveraged Sony's brands. But it lost out to bigger rivals Nokia and Samsung at the cheaper end of the market, and was late to react to Apple's entry into the high-end of the market. It has refocused its business to make smartphones using Google's Android platform, but has dropped to No. 9 in global cellphone rankings from No. 4 just a few years ago."
I lost all respect for Sony after Sony Entertainment Group pushed the hardware teams into implementing DRM. I don't buy Sony anymore, nor do I recommend it to friends and family.
John
>>I lost all respect for Sony after Sony Entertainment Group pushed the hardware teams into implementing DRM. I don't buy Sony anymore, nor do I recommend it to friends and family.
What, it wasn't when they installed rootkits on your computers (that you wanted to listen to audio CDs on how dare you) or when they secretly added a "you can't sue us" clause to their PS3 EULA? Oh, and if you don't agree to the updated terms, you can't play any games online, use the internet browser, stream Netflix, or patch your single player games? Or when they decided to make every multiplayer game come with a code, meaning that used games will cost you an extra $10 to play online (paid to Sony) and that normal, non-used game buyers and sellers will be fucking annoyed by having to punch in a long code every time they buy a game?
The problem with boycotting Sony is that there's sooo many reasons to do so.
I wonder if this is just a bit too late. It seems that Samsung has surpassed Sony as the everywhere premium electronics brand Sony was in the 90's.
It'll be interesting to see Sony-Ericsson return to the market. I remember when they were a big player alongside Nokia, Motorola and Samsung, but things are completely different in the post-iPhone (ie, Android) world. With Nokia out of the picture, and Motorola focusing almost entirely on the US market (even more than usual), it's really just Samsung and HTC. Both have done extremely well with Android. Sony-Ericsson, if they can move beyond the lackluster Xperia range, can bring a lot more diversity to the Android system.
I still won't buy one, you know, because it's Sony. But I welcome the competition.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
Sony can burn in hell.
At some point, consumers have to develop the discipline to exercise their only leverage and let corporations know that there are certain things that will not be tolerated.
Sony is by no means the only one on the list, or even the worst, but they've earned their way onto my pay-no-mind list.
The Sony portable minidisc recorder I bought at a garage sale some years ago for $5 in order to cannibalize the AD/DA converters was the last Sony product I will ever buy.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Google announced it is buying Motorola's mobile division in August and now Sony is going to swallow Ericsson mobile. I remember when "car" phones first came out those were about the only choices you had. How long until Microsoft buys Nokia?
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Well the rootkit did it for me. I had several customers that ended up infected thanks to that douchebaggery, that damned thing punched a hole in security a mile wide and no AV at the time would detect it (since it was listed as copy protection and not malware) so malware writers could use that like the giant hole in security it was and come right on in. I swear for like a year and a half that damned thing would bite folks, because thousands of those rooted CDs ended up in grandma's collection or in a used CD rack somewhere. Real PITA.
So Sony can fuck right off. i'm happy with the phone I have and for dad's newest toy I'm waiting for those new Nokia WinPhones to come out so I can compare them to Android (anyone know of a good candybar phone that can be set to ONLY surf on WiFi? Data plans here really suck ass) and see which is easiest for someone who is clueless to work., One thing is for sure, and that is there will NEVER be another Sony product in my home! to steal a line from Mr Garrison "You go to hell Sony, you go to hell and you die!"
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Besides the design, the last time I held a Sony Ericsson phone in my hand, I couldn't figure out how to use the horrible interface.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I wonder if this is just a bit too late. It seems that Samsung has surpassed Sony as the everywhere premium electronics brand Sony was in the 90's.
All it would take to fix that is a series of good and popular products. Sony has a decent brand, good distribution and talented engineers so it's certainly possible. While I'm not optimistic about their prospects, I certainly think it is premature to count them out entirely.
My personal take on Sony is that they have good hardware engineers but are not so great at software. This has become a bigger problem over time. They also have a tendency to try to lock in people with proprietary technology even when they've clearly lost the battle (betamax v VHA, minidisc v CD, SD vs Memory Stick, etc) which I think bites them. They have too much of a Not Invented Here syndrome. Worst of all they also have a built in conflict of interest between their content division and their equipment divisions. They try to lock down the content WAY too much. This makes their engineers essentially unable to provide the products people actually want.
Sony has been completely out played by Apple on what really 10 years ago people would have thought was Sony's natural market.
In the 90's Sony was the premium portable music brand, built on the walkman and diversified through the discmans and introduction of the technology in the minidisc. They totally missed the boat on the introduction and portable harddisk and flash memory based media players. What is most ironic is they pretty much had developed the key technologies for the minidisc in the early 90's, mainly music file compression algorythms and hardware encoding and decoding in the music player. The only thing that was missing was to replace the magneto optical discs with a hard-drive. Instead other people did it and perfected it instead and Sony came late to the party.
Sony then started to fight back against the brand dominance of the Ipod, by pushing the walkman phone idea, where the flash media player is integrated into the phone. For the time they were good music player phones. And this is where Apple really excelled, they anticipated the shift away from separate ipod and phone to the combined item, and decided that their best strategy was to make their own phone, and managed to wipe the floor with Sony again.
I loved my Ericsson phones. After Sony got involved, things got better in some regards, worse in others. Sony's insistence on pricey, proprietary memory when the world had moved to MicroSD. Sony's ongoing war against OS customizers, debranders, etc... made Apple look benevolent. Still, they made some lovely hardware here and there. I owned the K750i, which was the "best phone ever" for a few years. It was my first daily-carry cameraphone that performed like an acceptable point-n-shoot. They had the best Bluetooth stack. And when it came to U.S. customers... they completely dropped the ball. I blame the FCC for granting stupid, unique frequencies and preventing global competition, but Sony often planned to release new models to the U.S. and then usually pushed back those releases by a year or more. By the time the C905a was finally released, I had already left the brand for good.
Sony has conflicts of interest. Their "intellectual property" nonsense arm of the business has destroyed their consumer products division. Rootkits on audio CDs, Playstation fiascos every few months, harrassing Aibo software developers... The phone problems are more subtle, but annoy the enthusiastic customers. They have lacked vision and deliver a lot of "almost flagship" phones and very few "best of everything" models. The deal should be the other way around. I want to see Ericsson make phones without Sony mismanagement. Alternately, I want Sony to prove me wrong and get their house in order and release compelling new phones. How about a Qwerty slider, high resolution, Android phone with an amazing camera and well placed tactile media and camera controls? Nobody does that; SE phones used to have a unique corner on good interface; I'd love to see it happen again.