

Sony CEO: "If we had gone with Open Technology ... we would have beaten Apple" - jodrellblank
http://www.engadget.com/2009/05/11/sony-ceo-howard-stringer-if-we-had-gone-with-open-technology-f/

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mdasen
Apple was the first mover in this space. The iPod was the first music player
to use the 1.8" hard drives that changed music players from being either 128MB
flash devices or items too large for one's pocket. Add to that the wheel and
you just had a much better device. And others have still yet to match it -
even if they're open.

Sure, Sony's backwards approach meant that companies like SanDisk were able to
get ahead of them, but their devices just don't have the interface that
Apple's iPod has. And Sony has been really old-fashioned in their approach to
their devices recently. Where Apple has used new technology to create better
interfaces, Sony just hasn't kept up.

The issue today is that no one (except possibly Palm with its soon to be
released webOS) has been able to match Apple's interfaces, never mind exceed
them. And with Apple's volume, it's hard for a competitor with a poor
interface to undercut Apple on price. So you get items like the Dell DJ which
costs the same, but isn't as well designed.

For Sony to regain its position in portable electronics, it really needs to
figure out the interface that will make people's lives better than Apple's (or
at least just as good). Palm might be doing that by equaling Apple's
touchscreen design and going a little further with its "cards" metaphor, but
that's a bit of hopeful thinking on my part (as much as I like Apple, I like
competitive markets even better).

~~~
mynameishere
For those of us more interested in the quality of the, you know, sound-
producing part of the player, Sony has Apple beat.

~~~
siculars
(un)fortunately there are less audiophiles than consumers perfectly happy with
128kb mp3's pumping out of substandard earphones. and as long as that is the
case: apple > sony.

~~~
apmee
Or indeed consumers who are perfectly happy with the sound of 210 kb/s VBR
mp3s on an iPod through £80 Grado headphones.

I'm not trying to take any side myself here, but it does sound like you're
implying that it's the "audiophiles" versus the "mindless masses", when I
think you'll find there is also a significant population of people who value
good quality sound but who can't necessarily discern any difference in quality
between the top brands of mp3 player. I've owned models from three of them,
and I certainly can't.

~~~
zcrar70
Not to want to sound snobbish, but £80 headphones are kind of wasted on mp3s
in any case - if you compare listening to an mp3 and the same track on CD (or
in a lossless codec such as flac), you'd definitely notice the difference, and
appreciate the headphones more.

This being said, I have an iAudio and, using the same headphones, the sound is
noticeably better than my girlfriend's (more expensive) iPod.

~~~
derefr
Eh, I listen to live versions of things, mostly—all the quality that's going
to be lost was lost _before_ the track was even mastered, so it doesn't matter
if it's compressed, really.

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charlesju
The lesson here is simple: leverage pirates to gain critical mass.

YouTube did it. iPods did it. Justin.tv is doing it.

~~~
smikhanov
Sony could not do this. On one hand there's Sony Electronics willing the
pirates to leverage the use of their platform, on the other there's Sony Music
willing the pirates to go to jail, on the third side there's a manufacturing
department willing to raise the sales of Memory Sticks by locking Sony
Electronics' devices from supporting any other media.

And they all are subsidiaries of the same parent.

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phpguy
The big downside of any sony player I ever looked at was it always had to
convert my mp3's into some other format to work on the players. This took
forever and was a hassle.

~~~
neovive
Exactly. Beyond even the file format issues, when will Sony finally stop using
MemoryStick media.

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kqr2
He's been Chairman and CEO since 2005:

<http://www.sony.com/SCA/bios/stringer.shtml>

From the article:

 _We can no longer say that we're right and our customers are wrong. We can't
build only what we want to build._

It took 4 years to learn this valuable lesson.

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phoxix2
Here is a company that clearly never ate their own dog food ...

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Herring
I thought the whole point to a company was to become big enough that you don't
have to serve your customers. They _really_ didn't play mp3s?

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menloparkbum
He's sort of right. At least they would have been more competitive with apple.

Sony's engineers are good and their design teams have a decent aesthetic
sense. Their problem is lethargic and dull management.

I was involved with TWO different companies since 2001 who tried to partner
with sony offering exactly what he describes: open standards / open source
tools for distributing content to sony devices, and they dropped the ball both
times.

~~~
alain94040
Sony engineers are good at hardware design. But in software they are poor at
best.

Plus, the funny thing about a lot of hardware engineers is that they think
they can write software ok. At least software engineers don't pretend to
design hardware. So management takes a bunch of firmware engineers and expects
them to design great-looking apps. Right.

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jaxn
Interesting that they are currently getting their clock cleaned by Amazon on
the ebook reader side of things. The Sony eBook reader has been more open than
Amazon's.

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ErrantX
rubbish.

Apple had style and a slick user interface. AND they used massively
restrictive technology until very recently.

Sony made many many errors in the digital market game. Say what you want about
Apple they nailed the digital music player market with bullet-like precision.

~~~
systems
Well, another way to look at it, is using OPEN technologies would have helped
competing with a that slicker and more stylish interface

Worst but cheaper or greener can win better but more expensive!

But I don't believe he was aiming at worst, I think he meant or should have
meant that by using closed technology he was facing Apple alone, but by using
OPEN technologies he would have gathered a crowd and faced Apple with plenty
of parties on his side

Its the PC versus Apple all over again. Apple is doing great for now, but
eventually a PC-ish ecosystem for the handheld market will make it marginal!

~~~
ErrantX
Im not convinced that _would_ have helped. A group like you suggest does
loosely exist anyway without Sony, and it fails in a similar way - it is
lacking is a cheap, sexy content delivery system & an "integrated experience".

Apple has a system from the music distribution right down to the playback
device. It's an exercise in consumer manipulation.

Open formats wouldn't have fixed that problem. Look at the other digital music
player makers: they suffered the exact same problems. IF Sony had pitched and
sold an economic model and open format that worked from the distribution side
right down to the player then _maybe_ it would have worked. But they would
never have sold that to the media companies and music rights holders. Apple
got the mass content it did by using the proprietary format to make the rights
holders feel safe. NOW such an open model would work (and Apple are heading
that way, right) but Sony are too far behind now for it to be worth the
investment.

They messed up, IMO, by trying to compete full stop. Once the Ipod had market
traction as an iconic piece of tech they had lost that battle. They should
have focused on more niche markets (sports markets for example, or REALLY high
end devices etc etc).

EDIT: what you suggest in terms of the PC style eco system potentially might
occur. But I highly doubt it for 2 reasons. Firstly because the Ipod has got
so much more market traction that Macs ever did. They are the height of cool
and _always_ leading the way. Even the awesome might of Google is struggling
to beat the Iphone into submission even though it is a technically superior
more hackable infrastructure. Secondly because the market isn't as extensive
as the PC one.

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mattmcknight
It wasn't the first mover advantage with the 1.8" drives that made Apple win-
although that was a necessary ingredient. You can see this because the device
didn't get popular right away. It was the second mover advantage of iTunes,
which avoided the first mover's problems (Napster) that led to Apple's
dominance. Apple went with closed tech on the iTunes store, which combined
with device lock in to drive the iPod success. It was as if they had all of
the music, and you could only play it on an iPod. They made the player
compatible with MP3 (the open part Stringer refers to) so you could use all of
your old Napster downloads easily, and made the iTunes client capable of
ripping CDs easily. Once they made the iTunes client available for Windows it
was off to the races. The iPod is a great design, but on its own, it would not
have been dominant.

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yardie
For all the lock-in that everyone claims Apple has. From my experience I had
never bought anything from iTunes until just recently. When they finally
dropped the DRM on their music I assumed it was safe to proceed. I have had an
AppleID since the store opened. Their album covers were consistently the best
(other sites have sprung up since then), and stupidly easy to work with (right
click, download album art). The majority of my music is Lame encoded MP3,
reaching all the way back to 1997, AAC and ALAC for the more recent stuff. My
iPods 2G,5G, and Touch, plays everyone of them.

Before this I had a Sony MD player. At one point I really thought MD was the
future but Sony kept turning the screws, it was hard to get blank media, and
re-encoding my music just killed it for me.

BTW, for AAC, every device I bought in the last 2-3 years supports it. The
only exception was Windows OOTB, but that has changed in Windows7.

The last device I own from Sony is the PS3. I really think this is the last
stop as far as media is concerned. I've using a mediatank to hold my music and
HD movies. It has worked out wonderfully, the PS3 is barely touched. I've
unplugged it so I can free up an HDMI port.

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alecco
I don't buy it. This is the guy who pushed crazy DRM and Blu-Ray only
Playstation 3 to make his side of business, media, profit while the
traditional side of Sony (electronics and gaming) paid for the party. This
looks like another of his power plays.

I miss the old Sony.

~~~
jamesk2
I don't buy it either. Sony Electronics had the ability to beat Apple to the
market with a digital walkman but didn't because of the internal debates at
Sony about the dangers of MP3s.

Tying PS3 to Blu-Ray did make Blu-Ray win against HD-DVD but lost the real war
to XBox 360 & Streaming Media.

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10ren
Sony is expert at making money from proprietary standards. Will they, as an
organization, be able to adapt to all the changes required for making money
from open standards? It's a very different ball game.

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oscardelben
Anyway, they didn't. It's easy to talk after the fact.

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ahoyhere
No way.

Sony's divisions conflict each other (copyright ownership business vs
hardware/software product business).

And as another commentor noted, not only are their divisions run with
conflicting goals, but they pour ridiculous amounts of energy into trying to
create industry standard formats. And, almost every time, failing miserably.

Their hardware is "boutique" -- which means it's coolish, but totally
unmaintainable, their software is crap, and their integration is worse.

This guy is just wankin off in public, and telling himself (and everybody
else) that if he only bought the better brand of lube, he _could_ have been
having sex with a supermodel instead.

The poor suckers have never gotten over the Walkman.

