Sony To Lose $1.1 Billion, Maybe They Should Be Open

3:12 am EST January 13th, 2009 | News | 4 Comments

I’m sure part of it is the economy, but I get the feeling that Sony’s loss of billions is in part due to the closed nature of their products. Sony has the tendency to lock everything down with excessive DRM – look at how poorly their ebook reader has fared versus Amazon’s Kindle. I don’t necessarily think everything has to be open source la-dee-dah, but I think we’re increasingly in a world in tech and consumer electronics where you’ve got to be more open than Sony has been historically.

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4 Responses to “Sony To Lose $1.1 Billion, Maybe They Should Be Open”

  1. Randy Brown says:
    January 13, 2009 at 6:20 am

    Mebbe Sony should get out of the “content” business. The former CBS Records has turned to absolute shit since Sony bought it, and Columbia Pictures has struggled for most of the time since it’s acquisition by Big “S”.

    The record division should be divorced from BMG and sold to an American concern.

  2. Duros62 says:
    January 13, 2009 at 9:47 am

    I think we’re increasingly in a world in tech and consumer electronics where you’ve got to be more open than Sony has been historically.

    One would have thought the fantastic success of the Betamax would have clued them in, but no.
    The Memory stick.
    Memory stick Duo.
    Memory stick Pro Duo.

    Wankers.

  3. Gyuss Baaltar says:
    January 13, 2009 at 11:32 am

    If you lock down your product with DRM, I don’t buy it. I’m happy to pay for it, but I’m not being locked out of playing it on whatever device I choose.

    Sony’s gonna learn this the hard way.

  4. Randy Brown says:
    January 13, 2009 at 10:21 pm

    One would have thought the fantastic success of the Betamax would have clued them in, but no.

    Nope. Beta format as a consumer product was dying by the time I bought my first VCR (a Toshiba Beta) in 1985. It did hang on for many years more in professional applications, such as news cameras, until the advent of digital video. Beta DID offer somewhat better picture and sound quality than VHS (and Beta Hi-Fi sound was fantastic), but consumers seemed to like the longer playing/recording times available with VHS. (Beta maxed out at 5 hours on hard-to-find L-830 tapes, 4.5 hours on the standard L-750s.)

    More Sony products that never caught on:

    DAT (digital audio tape). Once popular in Japan, DAT was delayed in the USA for years by record companies that feared copying and piracy. (Ironically, one of those record companies was OWNED by Sony.) The solution was Serial Copy Management, which might be described as an early form of DRM. By the time DAT came out here, no one cared. The same fate befell Philips’ Digital Compact Cassette; people wanted to make their own CDs, dammit.

    Super Beta. Slightly higher resolution on home machines. Few were interested. (I own a fully-functional Sony Super Beta Hi-Fi deck that I found in a thrift shop 10 years ago – it’s nice.)

    8mm video as a digital audio recording system.

    Mini-Disc, and its proprietary ATRAC audio compression system. The Mini-Disc was a good idea, especially as Sony usually bundled together a deck for the home and a portable player – but the sound quality of ATRAC, a “lossy” compression system, was poor. MP3 was on the horizon.