Sony shoots itself in the foot. Again.
Posted on:
2006-12-13
A few days ago, I wrote a post about how Microsoft's favourite strategy is to keep being good enough and wait for the competition to screw up.
That strategy sure seems to be working against Sony.
- Their media wing won't let them produce an MP3 player, so they lose the digital music market to Apple.
- Their media wing is either evil or really negligent (in these cases is there really a difference?) and puts rootkit software on their music CDs, opening up millions of PCs to viruses and malware.
- They produce a game console that costs twice as much as the competition and can't produce enough of them for the Christmas 2006 season - and get beaten in sales by a sub-$200 box from Nintendo with a silly name.
- They get caught up in a bitter standards war between their Blu-Ray technology and the competing HD-DVD - neither side budges, so by the time there's a clear winner, everyone will just be downloading high def content over the internet and they'll both be obsolete.
- Actually, their screw up with the PS3 seems to have tilted the advantage to HD-DVD, which is - hey look - Microsoft's choice.
And now, they annoy their core fans by pretending to be be 'kewl' and creating fake viral videos. Penny Arcade has a colourful, if crass, response.
I gather they still make pretty good high-end video cameras, though. And the VAIO computers look nice too. Wonder how long those will last?
