edit: As other commenters pointed out there are some rather obvious categories I seem to have missed, including cameras and gaming consoles.
edit: As other commenters pointed out there are some rather obvious categories I seem to have missed, including cameras and gaming consoles.
The thing that still shocks me, though, is the degree to which they blew their market leading position in portable music players. They OWNED that market in the 80s and 90s with the then-ubiquitous Walkman brand, which they extended into the CD era with "Discman" players that seemingly everyone had when I went to college in 1988.
Internal politics (I assume?) kept them from introducing a reasonable MP3 player until far, far too late for them to catch up. Some of their early efforts literally required you to re-encode your music into another weird format to use (ATRAC, I think?) -- and this while smaller players (Rio, etc) had devices you could load by copying MP3s to a memory card. I assume this is because Sony Music was afraid of the Mp3 revolution, but my understanding is that Sony Electronics has always been far more profitable than Sony Music, so it's hard to understand how that tail ended up wagging that particular dog.
(Oh, and there's also Sony's bizarre insistence on proprietary formats, like MiniDISC and MemoryStick -- that didn't help them, either.)
And then, of course, Apple came in with the iPod and gathered up the high-end, high-margin customers that were Sony's constituency.
The Memory Stick was bizarre, no doubt about it. Minidisc (and with it, ATRAC), however, was quite groundbreaking and had the potential to be huge.
As a lossy psychoacoustic codec, ATRAC predated MP3 for years in commercial availability. Minidisc was both sturdy and flexible (esp. in comparison to DCC), had adequate audio quality (and later ATRAC versions became really good), and itcould have even been a contender for a 3.5" floppy successor in both capacity and speed. Sadly, this was the worst days of Sony hubris, both the physical format and the codec cost a lot to license, the use as a data medium was needlessly crippled, and as such it never really took off globally.
I really wonder what would have happened if Sony and Philips could have reconciled and worked together on this like they did with the CD, instead of going all format war (with the DCC being the real head-scratcher here...).
Minidisk didn't have either of those going for it -- plus, Sony's complete (?) control of it meant nobody else was making equipment. That nearly everyone brought CD decks to market in the early/mid 80s meant that, over the course of maybe 4 years, CD went from "rich dude toy" to "I got a CD boom box for high school graduation".
You probably nail it with "Sony Hubris." To think they could recreate that perfect storm of demand and success was bananas. People duplicated their music libraries on CD, but no WAY were they gonna do that AGAIN after having bought into "perfect sound forever" on CD.
(Well, at least "perfect sound for decades;" my oldest CDs are from 1987, and the ones I still want to listen to still sound fine.)
[suggested viewing: the techmoan episode on DAT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4K1QKKPX_g ]
It's not really different from iPods, those required iTunes to load music just like Sony's devices used SonicStage, with the difference of the iPod having an internal hard drive instead of a MiniDISC drive (and later CD walkmans with ATRAC/MP3 support).
Sony's early digital players required your music to be in Sony's proprietary format, which was a whole additional step. And remember, 20 years ago, re-encoding took longer, so it was meaningfully less convenient.
There's definitely a case to be made that requiring iTunes to load iPods/iPhones is annoying and needlessly complex, but I think it's clear Apple did this to make it more accessible to normal humans, not to exert control or in a quixotic attempt to sideline open codecs.
(That Apple's current path is clearly away from iTunes sync and towards independent device connections to Apple Music kinda bears this out, I think, even if that's not something I'm interested in using.)