Sony losing it?
Just the last week in the news:
First they retracted the iBean for not being competitive enough against the iPod.
Then I read this article at Ars: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060219-6216.html
Is Sony in real trouble for ideas? Do they have any clear marked leading products (in any category) right now they make money on? Or have they become yet another hardware producer? How long to APple take over Sony?
First they retracted the iBean for not being competitive enough against the iPod.
Then I read this article at Ars: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060219-6216.html
Is Sony in real trouble for ideas? Do they have any clear marked leading products (in any category) right now they make money on? Or have they become yet another hardware producer? How long to APple take over Sony?
Comments
I think the only place Sony still holds real market mojo is the pro broadcast division, which as near as I can tell is walled off from consumer and entertainment and runs its own shop.
TVs, until recently, were still a strong hold, but for some reason Sony was late to the flat screen party and let other manufacturers, notably Panasonic and Sharp, define that segment.
They make a killer product here and there, like a couple of high-end home theater video projectors, portable audio recorders and prosumer camcorders, but I think they really have managed to pretty much kill the aura of quality that used to surround the Sony name.
As I have mentioned elsewhere, some of it had to do with quality control problems. The word sort of got out that a lot of Sony consumer products seemed to die after 6 months or so. They backed that up with one of the most hideous customer relation systems I've ever in my life had to deal with. Totally unresponsive and deliberately hard to negotiate. Whenever I would talk to media pros they would curse at the mention of the name.
Then there's the endless segment proliferation, where they seem to offer 100 models of everything they make with no clear distinction between them.
And then there's that weird Sony tendency to wildly over-engineer everything, adding features that no-one asked for or needed. They always seem to be coming up with amazing solutions to problems nobody has, sometimes designing entire devices around markets that don't exist. Anybody remember Sony's multiple "e-book" readers?
And then then there's their lust for proprietary formats, where they're just sure that where they lead the market will follow, which explains all the memory stick, MD and UMD products on the market.
They need to tighten quality control, make their customer service not horrible, massively trim their product portfolio and get some discipline.
I think they still believe that they invented the modern world and have the right to dictate terms, so they definitely need to get over it.
Big, Expensive, and Manufacturing Problems = IBM.
and even though they have some die hard fans out there soon those to will be de-virginized.
sony overhypes everything and never truly delivers.
i see the ps3 going down.
people dont believe me
but just watch.
Originally posted by fahlman
"The other issue is the Cell processor. It's big (235mm2) and expensive to manufacture. As time goes by and IBM gets better at making the Cell, prices will drop and yields will improve. Once IBM moves to a 65nm manufacturing process for the Cell, that will help too."
Big, Expensive, and Manufacturing Problems = IBM.
Supposedly part of the Xbox 360 shortage was due to a lack of (IBM) CPUs. I hope Nintendo can escape this fate as IBM is their CPU supplier as well.
Originally posted by PBG4 Dude
Supposedly part of the Xbox 360 shortage was due to a lack of (IBM) CPUs. I hope Nintendo can escape this fate as IBM is their CPU supplier as well.
The failure was never by IBM, it was Infineon that messed up.