PC Magazine asks: "Will Sony Ever Be Sony Again?" (1 Viewer)

[MatthewA]

I found this article and I think it makes some good points:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2003413,00.asp

What does everyone else think?

 

[Ricardo C]

Excellent article. I particularly like the final paragraphs:

 

[Manus]

Can anyone else imagine what a vibrant, creative and dynamic industry would be be left from Hollywood to player development if this lot were taken out of the equation ?

Happy days,
~M~

 

[MatthewA]

I've begun to believe the only way to save this company is to spin off its content holdings (Music, Movies, etc) into a separate company. That includes Sony Music, Columbia Pictures, MGM, and every back catalogue they've collected through acquisitions (United Artists, Norman Lear, Orion, you name it).

 

[Pete T C]

I'll still buy their TVs. In fact, the display I'm using now is a Sony. But Blu-Ray just stinks of DRM and greed IMO.

 

[Ed St. Clair]

I think Sony's A/V (mostly video) R&D kicks some serious tail!
Their CS has a lot to be desired.
And they have indeed spread themselves too thin.

I don't want to give them any helpful hints, as its fun to watch them twist in the wind, after the way they have treated dealers and customers in the past.

 

[Fredster]

He says "Sony has been in a steep decline as far as innovation and clear thinking are concerned for at least a decade."

The author clearly missed the whole "Playstation" thing.

Perhaps he should stick the typical PC mag stuff - 101 Greatest Windows Registry Hacks or something like that....

 

[Manus]

I will never again purchase Sony hardware. They've been caught with their hand in the jar once too often IMO and I really do not trust them any more. I agree that they have become too huge a corporation (s) to be able to see where they want to be in 5-10 years time.Very poor management, very poor customer relations/attitude.

~M~

 

[Ed B]

Even though I own a large stash of Sony Products, 53"TV, 5.1DTS amp, PS2, etc.. I've lost faith in the company.

First I think that as they got larger their quality control has dropped. I was going to say that this is common but then I thought about Canon and how they continue to make excellent Cameras and Printers. With Sony's hands into so many things one would think that they have enough financial interests yet they're greedy by trying to force their media standards on the consumers such as Memory stick, Minidisc, and UMD. The PSP is locked down so you cant watch full resolution movies on a memory stick so you had to buy the UMD movie, recently they released a full resolution movie on the MS. The PSP is a great little handheld which could of done so much better if it had reasonable memory options, such as a CF slot and if it wasn't restrictively locked down. The PSP is about ready to fall into obscurity and they're ready to push their next gaming system leaving many customers / fans of the console left to hack their units to get some good use out of it. The PS3 is their flagship system, it could easily win the next gen console war however they're so arrogant that they feel the system will win regardless so they decided to add another non-standard format to the system, bd. This is the worst move that they could of done, this placed the console at a higher price than the competitors and its also backfired. The gamers don't care about BD they care about the games. If you've owned a PS2 you know that the lasers in those units failed and the thought of reducing the life span of your console to play movies was dumb, this will hold true even more when people play a $600 gaming machine.

Lastly Sony's most underhanded and shady thing ever done buy a large corp was to install rootkit viruses on their music CDs.

 

[Ryan-G]

No he didn't.

Playstation was designed for Nintendo, then released when Nintendo decided not to use it.

Playstation 2 promised to use the "Emotion Engine!" to do all kinds of things that couldn't be done on a PC, and be a media center besides. If you looked between the lines, Sony's goal was an attempt to be proprietary forcing studios into exclusivity. It was all it could do to match the X-box in terms of graphics in the end.

Playstation 3 is even worse. A poorly veiled attempt to take over the PC market and force exclusivity on developers by being everything to everyone, it'll be lucky to sell out it's initial shipments at it's ridiculously high pricing. It definitely will be a "Me too!", not top dog.

 

[Fredster]

Yes he did!

 

[Jerome Grate]

Interesting article. Sony still practices innovation, UMD, MiniDisc, Viao as mentioned in the article but their decision making practices is what's killing them. Sony did come up with BD and on paper it's clearly the format that we all would prefer, but with the problems of it's release, then this BD drives for the PCs will not play HD content is simply ridiculous. Bad decisions. Sony's fighting wars on many fronts here and their public relations is really down the dumps and that alone is a war in itself. Will Sony ever get back that luster of being an innovative company, hard to tell, but based on what has occured with the last decade says no.

 

[Kong Chang]

Sony Japan is rather on the innovative electronics side, more so than content...even though they also own their own music label and pictures, but their products in Japan are on par or better in Japan. I mean, blu-ray was released in Japan two years ago.

Sony USA, on the other hand, seems to be going backwards. Their focus seems to be more content and protection of content over electronics innovation from their mother company.

 

[Jerome Grate]

Incredible how Hollywood can control a company and it's products just so that they can protect content. I'm for content protection but not at the expense of strangling innovation.