Sony has so much potential, yet more often than not, I get the Impression that much of that potential is wasted, due to poor corporate decisions/blunders. Compare Sony to Apple, Apple is a cult, people love apple, people are enthusiastic about every new apple product. In my opinion Sony could very well go for a similar enthusiasm, yet it fails. Why?
Well the first question is would they want to do this? Sony has a much larger range of products, and is most likely a bigger company than Apple. This of course is pure speculation, and I don’t have any numbers ready, and I don’t even care. This is a rant about feelings and impressions.
So maybe Sony is quite happy with what they are doing, and maybe if they would try to go a similar route as apple they would lose, who knows? Maybe good enough is still good for Sony?
Take Product awareness for example, if Apple releases a little box to stream some video to your TV, then every single technology news site reports about it, and there is wide speculation all around the Internet about what chip might be inside. And of course, popular computer magazines are happy to spread the good news. So how does this work with Sony? There are 3 possibilities:
You see a wicked cool Sony device at a friends place, like for example that totally awesome media-center software that is shipped with some vaio laptops. I didn’t even knew that such a thing existed.
Second is a visit to a local electronics store, there you might stumble upon a totally unknown and exceptionally useful Sony item, like that super nice Computer-Display with integrated TV-Tuner, is anybody at Sony aware that there are very very few of such devices available? I know this, because I looked for such a thing. It is so useful, to save some space in the apartment, and the design is very cool and minimalistic as well.
And the third possibility is going to the Sony homepage doing some research for a rant, digging through the totally inconsistent and chaotic navigation, and suddenly discover a pearl such as these cool media-center PCs.
How does Sony expect me to tell my friends about new Sony stuff, if I don’t know about it?
As I already mentioned, Sony has some cool software under its belt, yet it seems to me as if they are so totally focused on hardware that they probably don’t care about the bundled software. Well, I would care, however I don’t know what is bundled, because I would need to buy one to find out, but I am not going to buy one unless I know about the bundled software, see the dilemma?
Oh, btw. The nice Video Editing Package Sony Vegas isn’t even available on the Austrian Sony Homepage. And on Sony.com the product page is very curde, no screenshots, no fancy usage scenarios, no animated tutorials, nothing. Compare this to Apples product pages.
Sarcasm follows: Eventually, if I want to buy a notebook, I need some software alongside, so why not sell, bundle or advertise it next to the notebooks? A computer without software is kind of pointless. Surprisingly, persistence pays off, and I finally have been able to find out about the bundled Software somewhere hidden in the product specifications. Of course, links or vivid descriptions are still absent.
Thank you Sony for trying so hard to sell me some stuff. Bah.
-Richard
Tags Rant, Geek Documents
February 1st, 2007 at 0:36
While Sony certainly gets a lot of things right, they manage to mismarket an awful lot of technology that wouldn’t even need promotion cause it’s so cool:
Betamax was much better than VHS
Blu-Ray is much better than HD-DVD
MiniDisk would have rocked as a storage medium (at least when it originally came out)
The PSP is an awesome Device
—except that all of them failed or are currently failing because of two things: weird copy protection mechanisms (this, oddly is true in one way or another for all the above technologies) and complete mishandling in distribution.
But, and this is even more odd: Apple really isn’t better than Sony when it comes to copy protection (see “itunes, norway”). They have just managed to create a kind of buzz around them that makes them very, very “hip” but that also annoys the hell out of me.
http://www.pvponline.com/article/3075/tue-jan-09
So maybe Sony and Apple represent two extremes: Sony has no idea how to handle their products promotion-wise, whereas Apple is slowly getting _too_ good at it. But I agree with you: they’re not that far apart.
February 1st, 2007 at 0:44
Oh, and BTW: that “Anonymous” posting is from me. It took me five times to submit it through that spam protection field. I hate spam.
February 1st, 2007 at 9:02
Hi,
I totally agree to your point, I am thinking about writing maybe a little series about all these Sony-Blunders.
-Richard
February 3rd, 2007 at 11:15
The thing is that Sony will not be the new Apple, but Apple the new Sony.