Sony’s Bread and Butter? It’s Not Electronics

Re:Sony’s Bread and Butter? It’s Not Electronics by ctdonath on Tuesday May 28, 2013 @10:22AM (#5780202)

Sony did try connected ecosystems. They did it early, did it proprietary, did it wrong, and customers went elsewhere. They tried gluing everything together with MemoryStick and ATRAC. Everything, and I mean everything, had a MS slot: TVs, pens (!), CD players...whether it made sense or not. Anything that did audio pressured users to adopt ATRAC, with grudging allowance for MP3. MS was too pricy for anyone else to adopt, so it lost out to CompactFlash & SD. ATRAC was just inferior. Once those fell, Sony had nothing tying products together, and the walled garden went to weeds.

They lost sight of why ecosystem components are linked. Having gotten severely burned, they were shy to adapt and rebuild the necessary cross-platform infrastructure.

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Re:Sony’s Bread and Butter? It’s Not Electronics by simba-hiiipower on Tuesday May 28, 2013 @10:31AM (#5780248)

> They lost sight of why ecosystem components are linked. Having gotten severely burned, they were shy to adapt and rebuild the necessary cross-platform infrastructure.

i think you hit the nail on the head there. connectivity for connectivity's sake doesn't produce much value. its having everything work together in a way that makes the experience better for the end-user that really matters.

[ Parent | on HN ]