Comment by kevingadd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kevingadd | Hacker News Reader

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I think the article does provide some compelling arguments to support this, though. To quote:

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Sony’s strategy never comes together as a cohesive whole because their engineers are constantly in competition with each other to become famous for creating the next big proprietary format or gadget. There are so many proprietary formats or unnecessary electronics coming out of Sony that it makes Sony’s overall strategy and identity very confusing. The engineers all want to be the guy who creates something as big as the Walkman or PlayStation, they are all competing for that recognition inside of the company. However their ideas are created based on the love for technology, not long-term profitability.

On April 2012, Hiroko Tabuchi wrote an article to the New York Times saying, “Sony remains dominated by proud, territorial engineers who often shun cooperation. For many of them, cost-cutting is the enemy of creativity — a legacy of Sony’s co-founders, Mr. Morita and Masaru Ibuka, who tried to foster a culture of independence. But the founders had more success than recent executives in exerting control over division managers.”

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This is certainly plausible, even if it's unfair to blame an engineering focus for Sony's failures. How else can you explain the fact that they STILL insist on using insane proprietary standards like ATRAC and even new Sony devices like the Vita use custom storage instead of standard (far less expensive) storage formats like SD cards? The fact that the PS3's absurd design got greenlit and made it all the way to ship is further evidence that engineers are given freedom to make myopic technology-focused choices.

How else can you explain the fact that they STILL insist on using insane proprietary standards like ATRAC and even new Sony devices like the Vita use custom storage instead of standard (far less expensive) storage formats like SD cards?

I don't know anything about the corporate culture at Sony, but I had assumed that their relentless, senseless pursuit of proprietary formats and interfaces (among other customer-hostile stupidity like the CD rootkit scandal) was a sign that wacky Sony marketers were running the show, not engineers.

Because pursuing a proprietary format is generally a terrible engineering decision. If your product has to touch the outside world in some way, and there's already a de-facto standard way of doing that touching, you'll generally get your product done sooner and cheaper by using the de-facto standard. And the product will work better for the user, too. That is to say, it will be cheaper to make and it will also be worth a higher price. What engineer could say no to that?

If those decisions were driven by engineers, they must come from a very different engineering culture than anything I'm familiar with. Even if this really is the fault of engineering amok, blaming "arrogant corporate culture" might communicate the situation more clearly than blaming "engineers."

Proprietary formats could be a manifestation of "Not Invented Here" syndrome, which is usually an engineer's vice. Granted, it's not often a good decision, but it's one that still gets made by engineers with regularity. The usual catalyst of NIH is thinking that the standards suck and you could do better. So, as you say, it requires that decisions be made not just by engineers, but arrogant engineers, with both those words sharing part of the blame.

Relentless pursuit of building the Best possible thing irregardless of silly things like profits, market share and time to market sounds very much like engineers I've run into. As does eschewing standard or off the shelf solutions in favour of something you made yourself since you're obviously much smarter and anything you build yourself will be much better since it will be designed around solving your problem. Not to mention that many engineers I know love building and designing from scratch rather than using something already available, simply because that's much more fun.

So it's a double-whammy of Cult Personalities who are all afflicted with Not Invented Here syndrome. I can see how that would lead to some massive problems.

It is painfully simple to find some example of tradition or technology focused engineering without regard to price in almost any piece of Sony hardware. Be it custom Sony ASICs in almost anything, overly complex mechanical constructions, PCB layouts that are optimized for obsolete manufacturing processes (there is certain Japanese layout style, which leads to boards that are insanely expensive to manufacture, at least anywhere outside Japan) or proprietary formats (ATRAC, UMD, MemoryStick ...) and overly complex interfaces (compare Game Cube and PS1/2 controller interface), and tendency to have hardware support for almost never used and often even never implemented features (just look at how much things were dropped in slimed-down versions of each playstation, or for how long did Bravia TV's had MS slot, USB and even later Ethernet ports marked "service only")

can you elaborate on the PCBs ? Just wondering what "Japanese layout style" means. Too many layers ? Not crowded enought ?

Board level: Lots of empty space and jumper wires, mostly single-sided (and single sided boards with screen-printed conductive ink are surprisingly common). Almost OCD approach to service markings. Wave soldered SMT on bottom side of single-sided THT board. Two-sided boards on phenolic paper with screen printed carbon vias. Process testing structures (trace impedance etc.) on each board and not common for whole panel. Incredible amounts of test points each individually marked in silkscreen. Affinity to build complex single-sided boards. Japanese specific components, mostly hybrid ICs combining different standard dies in one package, in Sony's case often completely standard components that are manufactured by Sony itself as second source with completely different markings and sometimes packages and pinouts.

System level: boards are mostly not self contained modules but designed all together (I have just seen some Yamaha design that essentially uses board to board connector and whole connected board as jumper wire). Lots of glue logic placed on random boards of whole system. Many instances of mostly empty single-sided boards with only connectors and jumper wires. Complex interconnect topologies between separate boards.

In my opinion this comes from history of Japanese electronics manufacturing, they after all started doing SMT in 60's or 70's. All this looks to be optimized for small scale prototyping runs and custom robotic assembly of large series, while most western designs are optimized towards mid-scale series using existing automation. Generally you get designs that look like simple Chinese designs optimized for large scale manual assembly (toys etc.), but are orders of magnitude more complex.

Look inside random DVD drive (as most of them are ODM'd by Sony, and by the way, when you want to buy new DVD drive try to find one that has Sony brand, as it is significantly cheaper) to see what I mean, in almost any HP laser printer it is painfully obvious which part is designed by HP and which is unmodified part of Canon's print engine (although there it is mostly because of different manufacturing processes).

>> "proprietary standards"

Well, I agree with you but look at Apple. They have been using proprietary connectors for most of their existence (mid 80s everything had to be made for Apple computers) and now the do the same silly thing with their iPads and iPhone connectors. Even their monitors do not have HDMI connectors! Sony certainly think of themselves as being competitors with Apple, and they see, I believe, no issue to take the same stance as them and make proprietary stuff all the way.

I don't think that's an apt comparison.

Apple has some proprietary stuff, but it's not that crazy. Apple used SCSI, standard floppy disks, cd drives, etc. Their floppy drives had extra features (like the eject motor), but the drives worked with bog standard floppy disks. Mini display port is a standard, so it's not that bad. When they ditched all the legacy stuff, they went with USB instead of inventing their own. Firewire was a standard too. They moved to Ethernet with the rest of the world, and used/promoted WiFi (even thought they had their own term for it).

Apple did how their custom ADC for a few years though.

But Sony is... in another world. They pushed SACD (technically a standard but no one cared), MiniDisc, Beta, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Duo, Memory Stick blah, the custom PSP discs, their proprietary music format, all sorts of stuff. They didn't use VHS-C mini video tapes, they used their own competing format. I believe they used their own MiniDV type format for a while. They had their own interconnect to connect their receivers to TVs for controlling things (not video, but turning on/off, volume, etc).

Firewire 400 had a standard connector, and it worked very well. Sony decided the connector was too big for their tiny camcorders, so they made their own. It was the little 4 pin FireWire connector that didn't pass power. That's the one most PC laptops later adopted, making it useless for external drives. Sony's connector, which they invented their own name for (i.Link 1394), had to be adopted into the standard because it became so common from Sony pushing it so much.

Sony and Apple have both lived in their own worlds (to a degree). What Sony is learning now is that when you're not on top that becomes a huge liability. Apple learned that when they nearly bankrupted themselves in the mid 90s.

First, bear in mind Apple consciously modeled itself on Sony (but, as it turns out, not slavishly).

Second, Apple tends to follow its own standards (e.g. iPod dock connector, magnetic power cord thing). Sony not only uses proprietary interfaces, it's inconsistent about them. E.g. At one point they had a range of MP3 players none of which used the same connector as another or earlier generation products.

Care to elaborate on PS3's absurd design? I'm curious. What are the most salient flaws of it?

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