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Why Sony Should Ditch Everything But the PlayStation
An anonymous reader writes: A couple weeks ago, we were surprised by news that Sony was spinning off its game development studio. More recently, the company has been thinking about exiting both the mobile phone market and the TV market. An opinion piece suggests Sony shouldn't stop there, focusing more on the its PlayStation division and a few other areas — and giving up on the rest. "Continuing to concentrate on phones and other products actually makes the PlayStation experience worse for most people. Take the PS4's ability to stream games to mobile devices — a killer feature needlessly limited to the PS Vita and Sony's Xperia Android line. Why can't I play Destiny on my iPad when the TV's occupied? The iOS PlayStation app, meanwhile, is a confusing mess that hasn't even been updated for the iPhone 6. These sound like minor points, but imagine what Sony could do if everyone at the company were focused on making its most important product as good as possible. As Microsoft is learning with its recent iOS and Android experiments, you have to serve the customers where they already are."
Electronics are a low-margin business. Sony is making huge money from Sony Entertainment. Movies, licensing syndicated TV shows, music ... they don't need PlayStation.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Next 40 posts will be about /. users who haven't bought anything from Sony since the rootkit fiasco, but reserve the right to complain about Sony products anyways.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
They should dump the "content" divisions..the movie studio and record company
The "content" divisions crippled innovation by insisting that the first priority must be content restrictions
They should shift their focus from style to substance
The "style" advocates crippled innovation by insisting that the first priority must be fashion
They should do whatever it takes to return to being the world's best electronics company
TFA writer is seriously myopic thinking that his console is more important than anything else. It would be s shame for Sony - for sll their faults they still are a quite impressive manufacturer - to be reduced to a one trick pony. And for what? A bloody game console? Why would anyone need another Nintendo? Besides, consoles cripple games. Deus Ex 2 could have been a much better game if not for consoles. And as for the xperia phones, they are actually decent. ANT+ support and IP55/56 is very handy outdoors.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Sony is a huge company with a lot of divisions. These articles are written from a western tech consumer point of view. Western tech consumers don't know about the non-consumer, non-tech, or non-western-facing business that Sony has.
Rather than reading this article, find something better to do with your time.
Why the hell would Sony focus on _one_ division that basically sells a dumbed-down crippled PC ?
They already bailed on the PC market last year
Their TV division loses money hand over fist:
Sony, the parent company doesn't stick to selling insurance policies. It sells TVs, too, even though it canâ(TM)t manage to do so profitably. Chief Executive Officer Kazuo Hirai said the company will lose money on its television business for the 10th year in a row, with the red ink for TVs this time amounting to Â¥ 25 billion yen.
And you want them to focus on a shitty under-clocked PC ???
Can we mod article: -1 Clueless Author
Sony have always wanted to be the giant behemoth that dictates the market and thus abuses it for their own profit at the expense of everyone else.
They have always done this and become exceptionally arrogant in the process..
The difference now is that they have become increasingly irrelevant while still vainly attempting those same business practices. It is a common progression for companies of this ilk. (e.g. Microsoft with the browser and search)
I think what should happen is that we should streamline OUR lives and be rid of Sony.
Electronics is low margin because of commodity parts and consumer demand for interoperability. Think, microwaves and computers. You don't need a special brand of microwave to heat Packaged Dinner Product.
Low margin vs. High demand
There's room for both low margin, and there's high demand items in consumer electronics.
When I needed a Windows laptop, before Bootcamp existed so that Windows could run on Apple hardware, I bought a Sony Vaio: it was the most beautiful non-Apple laptop on the market at the time, and when you are going into a VC to pitch your idea to them, you want to dress to impress, and that includes the machine on which you are giving your powerpoint on your business plan.
Vaio's were a high demand item because they had very good esthetics. A lot of other Sony products were higher margin than their competitors as well, because they were aimed at the high esthetic market.
The PlayStation is really a terrible product, comparatively speaking; the XBox is a much better product, based on Microsoft being able to leverage it to get game onto their desktop platforms as well (at some point), and potentially onto Windows Phones, as well (at some point), because the underlying platform technology is Windows on all three.
I think the person writing the article is a gamer who has drank the PlayStation Kool Aid, and wants Sony to concentrate on it, even though Sony is one PSN hack away from losing out on a holiday season, as they did previously. A single product company is just too vulnerable to single point of failure due to externalities.
It's a dumb idea because it would be a bad business decision on their part.
Right, but does the existence of a PC disguised as console and preloaded with Steam really say anything about Sony?
Sony is in the console industry, and the broader entertainment industry already, and they have a history in set-top boxes.
The railroad example only works in one direction; a company that ignores the larger market. It doesn't work to tell us about a company that already exists in the larger market, and other larger markets, and other large markets, and that sees many of these not being profitable.
The railroads lost out because they failed to even compete. Sony isn't in that situation, and the current restructuring plans don't implicate that situation. Sony is instead exiting from some areas it failed in, and moving around the rest so that the profit centers are in the corporate package together, and other parts are hidden away in owned subsidiaries. From a nerd perspective the whole thing can be summarized as, "some Sony divisions will be getting new names to make the bean-counters happy."
Steam being disruptive and having further disruptive potential is a totally different thing, and some brand of PC-fake-console is irrelevant to that, and doesn't drag Sony in.
>I think what should happen is that we should streamline OUR lives and be rid of Sony.
Done. Bought a PS3 in around 2008, and won a killer Vaio notebook in a contest around 2009 - severely disappointed in both for multiple reasons. Sony is off my approved vendor list, I just don't consider products with their brand anymore. Haven't encountered anything since the PS3 that is a "Sony exclusive" that I remotely care about owning.
I do give the PS3 credit for one thing, video games are essentially a way to waste time, and PS3 has taken that to a whole new level, wasting tons of time without even having to play the game at all. Update required x 100, only plays media in very specific formats, Alternate OS takes an inordinate amount of time to install, Alternate OS pulled as a feature after spending an inordinate amount of time giving it a chance to "own" my living room TV. Done.
I have an Intel NUC running the TV now, and instead of PS3 games, I have Steam. Instead of a crappy Media cataloging and playing experience I have Kodi and VLC. Instead of a gimped up web browser, I have Gimp and Chrome. Much better now.
A Playstation is a proprietary black box, regardless of what is under the hood. It doesn't interoperate. The characterization has nothing to do with however crappy the Sony crap is, but rather with what you can do with it, and what it is marketed as being able to do. A Playstation is a totally proprietary black box with a whole proprietary ecosystem built around it.
The whatever-its-called Steam box is just a generic PC with no special ecosystem whose entire purpose is just to run the same software available already for generic PCs.
The previous CEO burnt all the bridges and it will take the better part of a decade to rebuild them, if they ever can.
Say what you will about Sony but in the 80s and 90s you want a damned good cutting edge piece of gear that will easily last the better part of a decade if not longer? Then YOU BOUGHT SONY because everything from the solder to the picture tubes was the best quality you could get, just well built through and through. Then they got arrogant, spread the company too thin, and every time profits didn't hit what wall street wanted? Well just drop the quality without dropping the price and there ya go! It didn't take too many failed units before folks got wise to that shit and now everybody knows you buy Sony? What you get is a Vizio with a higher price tag.
So no shit they are thinking of bailing, like so many companies from IBM to Seagate they sold out the quality of the brand for short term gains, now its time to pay the check.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.