Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Fighting to keep their system closed, to keep users from something as innocuous as installing Linux on their hardware is not worth the trouble at this point. Learn when the winds have changes, and go with it.

Just to play Devil's advocate...

Perhaps Sony is taking the "maximize shareholder revenue" avenue. What is their financial loss for months of PSN downtime? A few people switch to xbox live? They have to provide a few free accounts?

For their other hacked services, they can simply shut them off as failed experiments, fire all the developers, and save even more money.

Because there is not some huge fine for leaking all the credit card information, this doesn't affect Sony at all, financially. But allowing people to run Linux means they may take a loss on a lot more devices (and if they don't take that loss, people will buy Wiis or Xboxes instead), and it makes piracy a lot easier. If piracy becomes too rampant, developers will stop targeting the Playstation, killing the entire line of business.

So while it makes them look dumb to keep getting hacked over and over again, maybe it isn't hurting them at all.

It's worth remembering that the expression "maximize shareholder value" is composed of three words, each of which represents a highly elastic variable. In combination, this set of terms can be defined (and redefined!) in a manner that will justify virtually anything.

Take "maximize" - depending on your timeframe, this can mean a range of very different things. And if you cleverly avoid specifying any timeframe at all, you've effectively said nothing whatsoever.

Now take "shareholder," which can refer to everyone from mutual funds that may buy and hold for decades to bots on high-frequency trading platforms that measure their holds in nanoseconds. There is virtually nothing that these extremes have in common. Given a hoplessly conflicted set of interests, how does management decide whose benefit they're going to privilege? More to the point, if they DON'T make a clear choice, how can they claim that the generic word has any legally-binding meaning?

Same goes for "value" - not only can this mean different things to different investors, those meanings can be diametrically opposed. For instance, does "value" mean providing a return big enough to outweigh very substantial exposure to risk? Or does "value" mean bunker-grade protection from risk, even at the cost of a low return? It's yet another very elastic term that can mean a lot of different things - or nothing at all, if the appropriate frame of reference is withheld.

The takeaway is simple: if anyone tells you they're "maximizing shareholder value" without carefully defining ALL THREE words, they're probably lying, which is ironic, because they're also implying that they're living up to their fiduciary responsibility. In reality, chances are good that they're doing the opposite.

In real life, it means: "the share price should increase faster than the broader market".

The problem is that now Sony's laughable security has become a meme that's growing in strength with every breach.

In the last week I've mentioned Sony's situation to a number of lay people who've never owned a Sony gaming machine but have all heard about these security issues and insist they'll never trust Sony with personal information ever again.

Every time a new headline is printed it strengthens this image.

they'll never trust Sony with personal information ever again

Fair enough, but Sony isn't in the "personal information" business. They can always create some new company to handle the PSN billing, which is the only personal information that matters to their bottom line.

I doubt anyone would think of PSN as giving their information to anyone other than Sony, regardless of the legal status of it. If this new 'meme' is putting people off Sony, they presumably wouldn't buy a PS4 in the first place, regardless of who handles the billing.

Such divisions rarely will actually occur to someone considering whether to use a Sony product. More generally though, I question that most people are going to think about this too much before buying - they'll think more about the downtime.

> In the last week I've mentioned Sony's situation to a number of lay people who've never owned a Sony gaming machine but have all heard about these security issues and insist they'll never trust Sony with personal information ever again.

No offense, but the tiny sampling size of the few people you talk to doesn't mean anything. The public happily gives more personal information to Facebook than Sony has on them.

I think thats a good argument, but it doesn't take into account the long term effect of brand destruction. Yes they can save money with a few games of organization, but the permanent damage your customer relations will hinder your production adoption, maybe irrevocably.

Going the more open route with Kinect seems to have done wonders for Microsoft and "shareholder value". At first they wanted to crack down on "hackers", too, but then they quickly learned that all those hacks are getting them a lot of free press in the big blogs, which in turn made it more popular with early adopters and tech influencers.

Ultimately, I think the loss is that a lot of people who were considering buying PS3's in the future now won't, and both existing and new users will think twice about buying Sony products in future.

Compared to the financial havoc that kind of reputational damage could reap, the cost of allowing Linux is pretty small.

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