Well, it seems like the rants have been flowing over the past few weeks. Here's one I've been thinking about for ages. Back in the day, Sony used to be a company that charged a premium for it's products, but they were good quality and if you wanted the best (without going upto super expensive brands) Sony was what you'd go for. In addition, Sony had a hand in bringing a lot of everyday technologies to market. Sony in fact became a world-wide brand on the back of transister radios that were shipped to the US and Europe in the 50s. Sony had a hand in the invention of the CD, 3.5" floppy disc and of course, the walkman.
Of course, success tends to breed arrogance and even back in the 80s this was seen in the form of the betamax vs vhs battle. Sony developed the technically superior betamax system but was so keen to keep the technology to itself (which lead to higher prices) that the public took vhs as the better option. As JVC allowed the vhs technology to be licenced, most electronics companies produced vhs machines rather than expensive betamax systems. The market flooded with cheaper vhs players and tapes. Sony had tried to push a proprietry format onto the consumer and failed. This legacy may soon be repeated, but more on that later.
In the 90s, Sony released 2 formats which should now be dominant in the world. The first was the minidisc. Released in 1992 as a digital upgrade to the cassette. It featured all the benefits of CDs (no quality loss, instant track skips and content information can be stored) with the flexibility of recorable tapes. In fact, once you had recorded them, you could split tracks, reorganise the running order and combine tracks. Unfortunately, Sony once again decided to try and keep the market for itself, so for the first few years the only recorders you could buy were Sony ones. And, holding a monopoly lead to high prices. As minidiscs started to wane, Sony finally lowered it's licencing fees and recorders from other companies began to appear and drive down prices. Unfortunately, pre recorded MDs died pretty soon after - CD players had become ubiquitous and most of the time a CD of an album and a blank MD cost less than the MD album and could be played in more places. It didn't help that it was only Sony Music artists that had their albums released on MD. Ironically, it was at this point that the original idea for MD took off. Amateur bands started embracing MD as a recording medium and blank disc sales took off. In Japan, MDs are only now being overhauled by MP3 players so on a trip around Akihabara in May it was quite surprising to see MD recorders still comanding prices of over £100 whilst more advanced devices fail to reach even £50 on eBay in the UK.
The second format is Super Audio CD. Introduced in 1999, it had the potential to replace CDs, offering superior sound quality compared to CDs and its equally unsuccessful rival, DVD-Audio. Releases can be made a hybrid discs that feature the SACD data held on a layer below a regular CD layer, allowing playback of the standard CD version in a CD player, but also allows the high quality mix to be played back on SACD players. This would seem to be the ideal situation as it would allow you to build your SACD collection wihout sacrificing the ability to play the albums on standard CD players. Unfortunately, Sony once again seem to be imposing a licence fee that puts off most labels from releasing in this format. Even though there are over 4000 SACD titles out there, the publics awareness of this format is practically non-existant.
Further attempts to push proprietry formats (that would essential "lock" people into buying further Sony products) included mp3 players that didn't actually play mp3s (only the Sony ATRAC format), memory cards that only worked in Sony products (whilst SD and CF cards have a much larger compatibility) lead many people to swear off buying Sony cameras and UMDs - films that could only be played on PSPs with no extras for 2-3 times the cost of a DVD.
In recent years, the build quality of Sony products has steadily decreased despite their price premium remaining intact. The build quality of most brands has decreased (after all, if stuff breaks sooner, we'll need to replace it more often) but Sony have taken it to a new level. From televisions sold as "future-proof" that can't even pick up digital teletext or all the freeview channels and have been abandoned by Sony to Playstations with laser diodes that stop functioning after a year. Sony's first foray into LCD televisions provided absolutely no future-proofing as the entire line weren't HD ready - a decsion that left many peoples £1300 tvs obsolete before they'd even got them home. The reason? Film studios (including Sony's) demanding that HD content be distributed via a certain connector that Sony didn't see fit to include.
It's widely rumoured that the only part of Sony that makes money anymore is the Playstation. After being betrayed by Nintendo over a planned CD addon for the SNES, Sony continued developing the machine and released the Playstation against the overpriced and underspecced Sega Saturn and the N64 with it's overpriced games. The playstation 2 promised revolutionary performance due to its "emotion engine", but in actual fact, the machine was less powerful than all three of its competitors (Sega's Dreamcast, Nintendo's Gamecube and Microsoft's xBox). However, Sony had the money to ensure that the most popular games remained exclusive to its console. Sony have been making strong claims about the new PS3 console. Unfortunately, many claims have amounted to nothing. Initially the PS3 and xBox360 were to be released within a few months of each other and be roughly equivalent in power. Microsoft pressed ahead with a worldwide launch last Christmas opting to stick with the DVD format whilst Sony, convinced the PS3 would sell no matter what, took the opportunity to include their new BluRay format in PS3. This seems to have backfired big time for Sony. Rumours (as linked to) of the components being too big to fit into the case, overheating and reports that most of the development team had been fired kept cropping up. Firstly the release was pushed back 6 months as the specifications for the new format were yet to be finished, the specs of the console were lowered due to stability and yield problems (ie if you make 100 chips, and only 20 of them work at the desired speed, do you press ahead and loose money on the chips that don't work or do you lower the specs so that maybe 40 of the chips work?). At the recent E3 exhibition, Sony proceeded to shock even their hardcore fans by announcing a $599/£425 pricetag for the PS3 and giving one of the most embarrasing press conferences in history. Have a look at this video.
Pretty funny stuff ("new features such as real-time weapon change", "based on famous battles that actually took place in ancient Japan - so here's this giant enemy crab")
Further bad news came with the release of the first BluRay player - the picture quality wasn't up to the standard of it's rival format, HD-DVD. And HD-DVD was half the price of BluRay. Suddenly the decision to include BluRay in PS3 was looking like a massive gamble that could lead to the failure of both the BluRay and Playstation brands. If BluRay fails to win the HD war then Sony has needlessly held up the release of the console by over a year and introduced a massive cost that even they admit will take it out of the price of most households. Should the PS3 fail to make an impact, then Sony's Trojan Horse tactics of getting BluRay into the homes of the masses will have failed. Finally, problems building the diode for the drives has meant that the worldwide availability of PS3 this Christmas will be limited to 100,000 in Japan (the 2 year old Nintendo DS sells this number every week) and 400,000 in the US with Europe missing out until 2007. This also means there will be a shortage of BluRay players too.
The major problem is simply that Sony, as a company, is far too big. It has its finger in too many pies: electronics, film studios, music labels and gaming and it's this that has lead to Sony's many recent problems. When designing the BluRay format, rather than developing a system that the consumer would want, Sony's movie studios got involved and started designing the system around the restrictive needs of the studio. Without the pressure to include BluRay, the PS3 could have launched last year and at a much more competitive price. Sony music's desire to control how people can listen to music they've bought has caused Sony to loose it's hold on the market that the Walkman enjoyed to Apple and countless others. Then stupid ideas such as the root-kit fiasco and creating ficticious film critics to give good reviews to Sony studio films and most recently the unfortunate discovery that laptops fitted with Sony batteries could burst into flames at any moment don't do the overall brand any favours at all. The only real way out is to properly split up the company and let the electronics company get on with designing products that the consumer wants, the gaming division to make use of the best technology around at the time and not pin their hopes to a white elephant and the music label to loose customers by itself without draging down the rest of the company.
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