Sony Wants To Take On iTunes
Sony is taking a page from the Apple playbook and will open an online store for music, film, books and other digital content next year. Years after iTunes launched and went on to dominate more than 70% of the global digital music market, the electronics and entertainment conglomerate has decided to enter the game.
Dubbed temporarily the Sony Online Service, the store is part of a wider plan to return the ailing giant to profitability. "Sony has been too focused on hardware," says Tokai Tokyo Research Center analyst Osamu Hirose. "It has to focus on networked products [and] delivering digital entertainment to consumers."
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You’d think they would’ve learned from their own mistakes. Does anyone remember Sony Connect?
I worked at Sony Music and I sure remember Sony Connect – when it was being developed, it was described to me by a Sony Corp executive as “a thumb Howard Stringer wants to push into Steve Job’s eye”. They honestly thought that it would steal a huge percentage of Apple’s marketshare.
One of the inherent problems with Sony is that the tech is developed in Japan, an insular market that has a consumer base that will consume anything Sony puts out because of loyalty. And the Japanese Sony executives believe this applies to the rest of the world as well.
Ex-US, there was a strong belief that the Japanese didn’t have a clue about what the ROW needed, so Japan’s thoughts and opinions were largely ignored or laughed at. So many obvious strategic synergies were missed, ad the blunders were endless.
For instance: When the PS2 was being launched (2000?), we suggested having a download store as part of the connected offering, but were told that the PS2 guys couldn’t/wouldn’t even consider the idea. And even after iTunes, they passed in this and pursued that goddawful Connect piece of shit, which was a red-headed stepchild from day one at Sony.
How about ATRAC, the proprietary codec that Sony Japan insisted we include in any content licensing deals, as they wanted ATRAC to compete with MP3 as the default codec for downloads to generate royalties to offset the decline of CD. Smart thinking, except ATRAC sucked, and only Sony portable devices could use it. It took them 5 or 6 years to drop that turd.
There are a myriad of problems with this “new” strategy, not the least of which is both the price and more important the perceived value of content is plummeting. but Sony’s biggest challenge here is a lack of internal talent and vision necessary to innovate in this space. Who will bet against their store being at best something that apes iTunes, or worse, a conservative, user-unfriendly offering that adds nothing to the space?
They simply don’t have the people to build something with any heart or imagination to be a game changer. And if they want to offer something that will return them to profitability (good luck with raising those thin digital content margins, guys), then they absolutely need a game changer.
Can anyone out there even name a forward thinking digital person at Sony, in any division?
This is yet another reason why I’ll never buy another Sony product ever again.
Open source is the way forward… MP3 and FLAC will outlive anything proprietary… good luck with it tho Sony…
^dude, i hear yea…they should have went open source!
Hah, not since the walkman…
One problem with Sony is that it has gotten to big and all the divisons act like different companies.
Either merged them together and make them act like there apart of the same company or just spin the off.
Let one division handle all software so that all products can work together.
One division doesn’t know what the same division in another country is doing.
They have to many damn joint ventures.
Why does none of the software from one divison work with the products of another. There is not one piece of software from the company that is made in one division that can work in another.
Remember the RIAA which Sony is a member was suing a software association which Sony is also a member of conflict of interest why the hell you suing yourself.
“Thumb in the eye…” That’s exactly the kind of old school douche aggro language we heard more than our share of while there…Actually, they would have had to pull that thumb out of their ass 1st….sorry I couldn’t resist.
I had a paragraph here but I deleted it.
much DSD_DISC Records,
bbb
wheatus.com
S.O.S. The Sony ship is sinking!
MP3 is open source ?