How Sony lost its groove - Opinion

[SamuelRSmith]

Soleron said:

"Since the iPhone’s software, rather than its hardware, drives most of the user experience, consumers are not so much using a product designed for them as one designed by them. "

"Every time users install an application or download a song, they experience an emotional impact on par with what they felt when they bought the product. "

The stupidest things I've read all day. People don't buy iPhones because they want to customise everything themselves. They buy them because out of the box it does exactly what they want it to do: phone people, browse the internet, play music and video. That's all. It's very simple. It's Sony's devices that have WAY TOO MANY options and terrible defaults.

I (partially) disagree. The main reason behind people buying iPhones (and smart phones, in general) is for the extensibility of the feature set through apps, with a clean central interface to get between them. Until Sony (and others) realise(s) this, and that it's not all about being able to do everything out of the box, they will continue a downwards path.

The problem is that it may already be too late... why would anybody who has already spent a lot of money on the Apple ecosystem give up all their apps just to rebuy them on another platform? And why would anybody going in pick up something other than iOS/Android when there is already such a huge userbase and app catalogue on those platforms?

Sony, in order to turn things around, would need to create something that will literally blow the minds of customers, as well as provide a great ecosystem across multiple platforms, and literally pay software developers to port all of the top apps over to the platform. On top of this, they need to make sure that whatever they do cannot be mimicked by Apple within the 18-24 months after they hit the market.

In other words... they can't do it.