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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."
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 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 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.
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!
On the PlayStation, yes. There you have no choice. But on the PC? Especially with all the good press from the Sony software installed on PCs in the past... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal http://techreport.com/discussions/13096 They will have a hard time overcoming this with a lot of users. It is actually a factor in the hardware losses they have had.
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!"
Forget the rootkit,
Every Vaio laptop I have bought and configured with a windows env (yikes) needs half a day of scrubbing to remove all the idiotic sony Vaio programs, services or UIs... And then you have the addware that comes pre installed... Plainly it is easier to buy a retail version of windows and slap it on than going through all the pain. In all fairness though Vaio's, as long as I can remember them, seem to be sturdier designs than cheaper alternatives and often have better screens also. But the software is plain criminal.
-- no sig today
What? App Store developed from iTunes Store, XBLIG has nothing to do with it. By the way XBLIG/XBLA is a half-baked rip-off of Steam: 2DBoy (creators of World of Goo) made this interesting survey about XBLA. Actually PSN is more open than XBLA, as in "more accessible".
Surely their objective is something like iTunes, that is something that appeals a snobbish crowd, and not a XBLA, that is the Zune of the online store services.
I don't think many consumers are aware of the rootkit fiasco. Some time ago, I spoke to someone who worked for Sony, selling professional TV studio equipment -- he had not heard of the rootkit fiasco. If the employees haven't heard of the issue, why would the general population?
On the other hand, Sony used to build premium products and charge premium prices for them. I recall reading (during the late '80s I think) that Sony was the most valuable brand name in the world. Now they build cr*p and still charge premium prices. They also make those devices even more expensive for consumers by using proprietary add-ons such as Sony memory sticks. Consumers have started to notice those things. Sony was living off its valuable brand name for years, but now that train has hit the buffers.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!