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Sony's New CEO To Look Beyond Hardware
angry tapir writes "Sony's new CEO says the company needs to move on from its hardware roots. From its inception, the company has defined itself through its gadget lines — Walkman, Vaio, Cyber-shot, PlayStation — but incoming CEO Kazuo Hirai, who will officially lead the company from April, says Sony must now focus more on the software and platforms they access. He said he wants to model the company after its successful PlayStation gaming business, which he helped turn around, where 'hardware drives software, and software drives hardware, and it's all tied in by the network.' Sony is forecasting nearly US$3 billion in losses for the fiscal year through March."
They have far more success with their software anyway. Look at how well Star Wars: Galaxies is doing!
Sony is just too conservative and unwilling to invest to be successful in the software business. 90% of their time will be spent locking down systems and adding DRM. They won't build what the customer wants.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
I've had a PS3 since 2007 and have never created a playstation network account (which I'm quite glad about now given recent events). Its purely a gaming machine and thats all it'll ever be. If I want some sort of lifestyle/media server I've got my PC which is a lot better at it.
Hardware is becoming generic and software is becoming critical. Software should at least be a big part of the plan. Sounds reasonable enough to me.
I'd rage about Sony evilness ... but that would be offtopic (and I'm sure there will be plenty of that anyway by people much more serious about it than me!).
They need to focus more on developing better and more intrusive rootkits in their devices.
Maybe Sony hardware used to be worth the premium, way back when, but nowadays they are just trading on their reputation.
I had a Sony Viao laptop for years. It was OK, nothing wrong with it, but equally there was nothing so amazingly right with it that it was worth the huge pricetag - the same spec laptop with another brand label on it would have been just as good at 2/3 the price. It's a shame, because there is room in a market for a gadget manufacturer that sets itself apart from the competition by offering superior reliability / build quality / robustness.
I think customers have been catching on to this the last few years, and Sony's hardware sales have dropped as a result.
Your hardware was always good, but your focus on lock-in with nonstandard things like Memory Stick and user-hating products like the rootkit DRM on audio CDs is what killed you. Geeks everywhere have been telling their family and friends that you suck for the last decade. That tide will not change before you lose a lot more money. Just close up shop and call it a day.
Sony is one of the largest Robotics companies in the world (and I don't mean industrial robots). It only makes sense they want to put some brains in those robots.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Sony's New and Improved RootKit offerings from its newly established Consumer RootKit division will be available in two versions -- a free, advertising supported version, as well as a monthly subscription-based model. Subscriptions will require providing your Credit Card information via Sony's latest WebPortal hosted on its bulletproof servers ...
Decline started when they got into owning content.
Too busy building hardware to protect the content whereas the free market builds hardware to satisfy consumers, and the free market wins every time, eventually.
Sony could add a feature to its hardware platforms to allow loading/running an alternate OS. Preferably one that would attract lots of developers to their platforms. Perhaps even an open source OS, thereby making the best community developed products easy to distribute.
Nah. It would never work.
Have gnu, will travel.
And now, for a thousand generations, geeks everywhere will be telling their family and friends that Sony sucks; and they won't even know they're doing it.
Sony has been defined by overpriced accessories, rootkits, removed features, draconian network DRM, and in recent times, a lack of concern for protection of customer data. The only thing Sony that I've even remotely enjoyed recently has been my Sony monitor headphones, a simple, cheap and good quality hardware device. If this CEO wants to get Sony back on the right track, he'll solve these problems. Looks like he's getting off on the right foot, at least.
And he's right. In the long term, and that might be another couple of generations, game consoles will be terminals, TV's were dumb terminals and need to be made smart, smartphones can't distinguish themselves from one another if they are all basically the same hardware and software.
Hardware is a bad business to be in. There is becoming less and less of a need for a lot of different foundries, sure there will be some world wide but they are, by and large, astronomically expensive and need to have multiple customers, this is your TSMC, Intel, AMD etc. Given that, Sony, along with everyone else, is buying from them. That means your differentiation comes from what you run on the hardware, not what the hardware is.
Sony *should* own some major portion of the mobile market place. But it doesn't. It has just another android phone basically x10. The PS vita should be *the* premium android phone right now. But it isn't. That's a software and a vision problem, not hardware problem. Because what does a Sony smartphone bring to the table with software?
Sony *should* have a secure, reliable network that people can trust to buy movies music and games on, and that will be up 'all the time' (within reason of course), and, given the PSN outages last year, that isn't the case.
The future for Sony is smart boxes that go with (or inside) dumb boxes, and link up to their smart software services. TV on demand, on your TV, or PS1, 2, 3 or 4 games, all over the net. That may mean running their own cloud backend. But it's still known hardware problems solved with engaging software that's better than the other guy, not shitty software with somehow innovative hardware, because there's not a lot to innovate on the hardware.
In other words, they're largely a consumer facing version of IBM or HP. I'm sure they have, and could do more with the battery/chemicals business and so on, the backend may be boring tech but it can be useful. They can make TV's that use 70% less power for example. But pitching that to consumers requires informed consumers, and most of us, about most of the technology we use, aren't, or at least aren't informed enough for things like a TV that uses 70% less power, but costs 2x as much to even know if that's a worthwhile deal. They could, I suppose, choose to radically reinvest in something else, solar power, that kind of thing, but most of their innovation has been in content distribution (floppy disks, CD's, DVD's, Blu Ray, the whole gaming business etc.) and content delivery at that level is now a networking infrastructure problem.
They've seen Apple's successful walled garden model and want in
Historically, PlayStation has been even less open than iOS. The walled garden model popularized by Apple's App Store actually appeared first in Xbox Live Indie Games, an alternative to Xbox Live Arcade for individuals and small family businesses without the requirement of a secure office and "industry experience". Does SCE plan to introduce anything like XBLIG any time soon?
It was evident at CES this year. Samsung is the new Sony. Sure, Samsung is getting into the Apps/Online content thing as well, but as far as hardware goes, Samsung has probably beaten Sony in every arena except for gaming.
Sony's booth at CES was 200 Sq Ft. bigger than Samsung's booth, but it had half as much product. Samsung, by contrast, had a 30,000 Sq.Ft. booth filled to the rim with gadgets and TVs.
Good luck with that "software drives the hardware" strategy Sony. Very few companies have been able to succeed at that model - actually, I can only think of one - a fruit company based out of Cupertino....
-ted
Format changes have demonstrated that there is always a new market in media players
But after 1080p Blu-ray and 1080p Internet VOD, both of which a PS3 and several other BD players can already handle easily, what's the next format for noninteractive video? I don't see a great leap in media formats like the leap from VHS to DVD or from discs to Internet VOD in the near future, nor even a minor resolution improvement like DVD to BD or 480p VOD to 1080p VOD. Nor do I see 2160p (aka 4K) displays becoming affordable any time soon, especially given that people just recently upgraded to 1080p compared to the decades-long lifetime of 480i.
Or perhaps put brains in the robots but promote them to management. They couldn't do any worse at the moment!
After all their misdeeds, offing themselves the HP way. Honorable.
When they (Sony) start making a product worth a damn maybe I'll go back to being a customer. Since Sir Singer's reign Sony has only managed to produce overpriced POSs with a Sony brand name slapped across the front. (in my opinion)
For one, they should focus first on security. Sony has been hacked recently in so many and obvious ways, it would make win 3.1 blush.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Couldn't happen to nicer company or investors.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
First thing Sony needs to do is quit dicking their customers over. Be it intentional (root-kits) or accidental (losing PS Network account data), it must stop. Nothing else that you attempt to do will stand a chance of success until you learn to treat your customers with a wee bit of respect.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
I know boycotts are written off quickly but I've been carefully to minimize the number of pennies I hand to Sony. I suppose a few have slipped now and then if I rented a movie from a studio that Sony has ownership in, but in all seriousness, I have made a conscious effort not to spend money on their products.
I know others are doing the same.
Sony has not been about hardware since Stringer took office, and everything else was put under the thumb of Sony Music and Pictures.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
or not getting 3 billion of what you think you deserve? there is a difference
May God have mercy on our souls
Imaging is what they do best, at least on consumer to semi-pro level. Their cameras, camcorders and TVs are quite nice. They are also very good at image processing. For example their camcorders have excellent digital stabilization.
As for software, Sony Vegas is one of the best NLE for small budgets.
Everything else they do is average quality stuff at best, and they are shitty at everything security-related.
It seems like it's yearly now that Sony comes out with some apology or explanation about why they suck along promises to do better. They never do. They already apologized for having crappy software like six years ago.
Fool me once, shame on me, fool me ninety-nine times and ... well ... you ain't gonna fool me again.
or else!
I've said it for 5+ years now. Sony wishes they were Apple. They've been biting Apple's hardware design for years. Their biggest problem is that they don't have any good software.
If you lend someone $20 and never see that person again, it was probably worth it.
They need to start by cleaning up the XMB and the PSN web page for starters. I've only had a PS3 for over a year, but from what I've heard they haven't touched the XMB design in years. I find it poorly designed, slow and in need of a refresh. The PSN web page is terrible and feels like it a design from 6 years ago.
Microsoft on the other hand keeps upgrading and refreshing the XBox dash and web site every 6 months or so. Sure they have had some hits and misses (ie the last dash), but I find I get where I want to go quicker and easier in their dashboard. The XBOX webpage is far superior to the PSN counterpart, you can actually do useful things on it. The PSN web page basically just allows you to see which of your friends are online.
If Sony is series about looking beyond hardware these are the two places they need to focus their efforts first, IMO.
...who was planning on betting the company on 3d TV?
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You used to pay a premium for Sony quality for consumer grade equipment, wether it was in TVs, monitors, audio etc. When that quality went away, in part when Sony's exports came from places other than Japan, it became hard to justify that premium.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
Yep. After dealing with Sony's customer "service" in Australia, for a product which turned out to have two manufacturing defects, I will never ever buy Sony products again.
Right down to CDs and batteries.
The whole company can burn for all I care.
Sony was pretty good at hardware, when they were a hardware company. They made things for the consumer, that do what the consumer wants.
Then they became hardware and media. The media side didn't like the hardware side making things that did what the consumer wants. They wanted everything locked down. The consumer was no longer being served, and they went seriously downhill. The media side ruined the hardware side.
Hopefully the media side will continue to ruin Sony, and they will cease to exist.