Sony begins to feel the pain of market rejection

[quikchange]

For the past few years I have watched as Sony continued to flout consumer preferences in favour of pushing it's intellectual property. They avoided open standards like CompactFlash & MMC (and even licensable collaborative ones like Secure Digital) in favour of their home-grown Memory Stick technology that had to be licensed from them. As a result,

Comments

[zedinbed]

It would be interesting to see how many of those employees own iPods, the device that single handedly cost them their jobs.

[lambda_calculus]

That decide didn't cost them their jobs. Don't forget that Sony created the portable music player market in the first place, and theoretically had the name-brand status to quickly tap into innovations.

The fact that Sony was a complete idiot when it came to riding the MP3-player wave, the fact that the content producer part of Sony wanted to completely castrate the consumer electronic's desire for innovative and usable products ... those are what cost Sony employees their jobs.

[quikchange]

It Microsoft, not Sony, whose employees are sporting iPods en masse.

[andytheace]

sound to me a lot like Apple secluding themselves for the PC world, due to their separate media and all.

[quikchange]

That analogy is accurate for the Memory Stick fiasco but doesn't cover the larger issue of Sony trying to compete in 2 naturally oppositional markets.

[canoe_drew]

Sony's starting to come around -- At least the camera department is. The latest high-end camera (DSC-R1) takes both compact flash and sony memory. It also has a large sensor which should make for some very smooth shots. This might just be the first Sony that's worth buying.

http://www.dpreview.com/articles/sonydscr1/

[quikchange]

Well, there have always been at least some parts of Sony that had their heads on straight. The PlayStation folks were pretty good about promoting the use of Linux on the PS/2, for instance.

[thepolemicist]

I'll try not to take all this personally

[quikchange]

When I wrote that it had completely slipped my mind that you actually worked there!

I'm glad to hear that Sony has finally seeen the light & is making efforts to fix things. IBM was starting to do the same thing when I last worked there and the results are just beginning to show fruit with its new Workplace product line. Here's hoping Sony manages to pull off a successful turnaround too.

[quikchange]

It doesn't look like Sony has quite learnt their lesson yet...