Sony CEO: "If we had gone with Open Technology ... we would have beaten Apple" | Hacker News Reader

Sony CEO: "If we had gone with Open Technology ... we would have beaten Apple"

engadget.com

38 pointsjodrellblank37 comments

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).

I think if Sony had made MemoryStick and MiniDisk (or whatever it was called) a lot more "open," they would have killed the competition.

Agreed. I'm just thrilled they're having these revelations now, but everyone was complaining about all their little proprietary hardware storage back when it was released. So instead of saying "we told ya so", how about "eh, screw em".

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

(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.

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.

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.

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.

Have you ever put yourself through a double-blind test on this issue?

Since the previous comment didn't just talk about mp3s in general but specifically mentioned 210Kbps VBR I think you'll find it an eye opening experience.

What is a blind ABX test? http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=1629...

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=ABX

You have $3000 speaker cables suspended from the floor on little plastic feet, don't you? :)

For a great example of Sony being ridiculously old fashioned, just look at the tape loading like mechanism of the PSP. It's ridiculous. And the UMD proprietory format (Sony when will you stop trying to create and control the next big format. They've failed so many times it's not funny any more).

I think they won with blueray.

Are you serious? ;) The Bluray vs HD-DVD war was irrelevant to most people. It's a stopgap until we all go digital. They were trying to squeeze out one last physical media...

:) That's an interesting perspective, and I agree with your anti-Sony sentiment. But, I believe blueray has sold many PS3s and will be worth their trouble in the long run.

(I've only seen one PS3 game I've wanted to play that wasn't also on 360.)

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

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

And Kindle with native PDF support.

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.

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.

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

All Sony players have been playing MP3 since about an year. Their earliest players used a proprietary format. Actually, their current players are really good (particularly in sound quality) though they use a terrible naming scheme for their models.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Only, by the time that happens, Apple will have moved onto their next product. At the rate they're currently going at least.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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