Sony CEO: “We Could Have Beaten Apple”
"Sony hasn't taken open technology very seriously in the past. Its CONNECT music download service was a failure. It was based on OpenMG, a proprietary digital rights management (DRM) technology….
This approach, however, created a problem: customers couldn't download music from any Websites except those that contracted with Sony. If we had gone with open technology from the start, I think we probably would have beaten Apple Inc. of the US."
– Sony Chairmen & CEO Howard Stringer
And the cow jumped over the moon…
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Sir Howard is saying that Sony could have been an internet/computer company like Apple, but that ship sailed when Sony bought music and film companies, which had a business necessity to fight copying. A company can’t “fight copying” and “be an Internet leader” — the two positions are inherently in opposition.
(And as a digression, my wife owned a Sony VAIO laptop around 2000, and it was a piece of junk — its original operating system collapsed**, and its flimsy plastic case would not support routine maintenance like a hard disk replacement. She’s now happily all-Apple with her iBook and multiple iPods.)
**footnote: OK, maybe it’s not fair to blame Sony for WindowsME. 🙂
*** to be fair, the speech is worth reading, but Sony has trashed so much goodwill in the last decade, and lost leadership in so many categories, that I don’t see how they turn the ship around. Where’s the 80 gig Sony MP3 player? Where’s the equivalent of the classic WM-D6C high quality cassette Walkman recorder, one of the best cassette machines ever, of any size? Oh, Apple owns the playback market and Edirol owns the recorder market.