| WiiBox3 said: One of Sony's biggest mistakes was what they did in their Television and Walkman divisions. For the television side of things while Hitachi and Sharp were working on flat panel TVs, Sony continued to invest in their Trinitron line. They didn't believe that flat panels would take off as soon as they did. When they started becoming popular Sony had to team up with a Korean company (I can't remember if it was LG or Samsung) to have them produce their LCDs and Plasmas for them. This has cost them lots of R&D time to have the best product on the market to fit their pricing strategy. Similarly with their music division they did not rush to have the best MP3 player on the market, but instead focused on their Discman (which could play mp3s of a cd), MDs, and the S-CD while Apple started to make the IPod a household name. By the time that Sony did start bringing their mp3 players to market they did not try to differentiate themselves from the competition to prove that they were the big boy on the block. This lead them to where the did go partially right, with the Blu-ray and PS3. The Blu-ray was a good innovation by Sony and they were smart to pack it into the PS3 to help promote the technology, but they could have made it more successful out of the gate if they had used M$ HDi software preventing the HD war and thus the format would be more popular today. This would have probably also led to an external Blu-Ray drive for the 360 instead of a HD-DVD drive. (this would have made Sony a lot more money since each Blu-Ray disc bought brings in a little cash for them) To me the PS3 is where Sony was trying to make up for their mistakes with their TVs and digital music players. They heavily innovated for this product. They decided to make a product that many believe to be superior to the competition, with everything packed in. Unfortunately for them was the resulting price to produce the gaming product. Gamers are not known to be rich, but since the PS brand is a very strong one worldwide they took the chance in releasing a very expensive console, even more so than M$'s expensive 360(at the time). There are many different things that have plagued this great product, lack of 3rd party support in the initial stages, the need to remove backcompat, remove 2 USBs, etc. Now the PS3 is becoming popular, but each one sold is still loosing money for Sony and even though they price has fallen it is still the most expensive one on the market which has hurt it's casual appeal that the PS2 had. What can Sony do to fix itself?... I'm not sure, but as I posted earlier I hope they do. |
SONY did team up with Samsung for LCD panel production, but later teamed up with Sharp in early 2008 to make LCD TV's. SONY still employs its BRAVIA technology in their LCD TV's. But SONY was making Trinitrons, CRT rear projections, LCD's, and LCD rear projections when Sharp was making LCD TV's.
Even Ken Katuragi chastized SONY for not taking advantage of the mp3 market when they should have before he was forced out of SONY.
I have to disagree with you in regards to HDi since it was Microsoft who never showed any favors towards Blu-ray but was trying to slow/hurt the HD optical format adoption by pushing a format war in support of HD-DVD. This was not the fault of SONY and/or the Blu-ray Disc Association, but more of Microsoft's "marketing" in favor of digital distribution by helping feuling confusion in the fornat war.
Hackers are poor nerds who don't wash.
