Sony Already Lost Media War to Apple?

Declan McCullagh writes "Sony's Walkman was the king of media players. Now Apple's iPod is, and Sony Connect was a flop. But Sony's problems may soon be even bigger: the company is having a remarkably difficult time coordinating software development across different divisions and continents, and some managers are worried that things may be getting worse. Will Apple's recent forays into the living room create even more of a problem for Sony?"

Re:You have got to be kidding me.

[NitsujTPU]

It's an Apple X-Box without much beef under the hood.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Pippin [wikipedia.org]

I think that if they used the X-Box as a prototype, that they could do just fine with this. They sell iPods for as much as video game consoles, and all that those are is beefed up mp3 players with their own clothing line.

Re:Stifling their own innovation

[Anonymous Coward]

I would have to agree on you with this. I finally replaced my old minidisc recorder (circa 1999) with one of the newer models capable of playing mp3 natively. The hardware is beatiful and built to last but SonicStage is easily the most awful music software I have ever used. Its hard to emphasize how bad it is. Its not even an issue with speed (it is damn slow since I am running it under VPC) but more a user-freindliness issue. No easy search text box like itunes, ability to only perform one action at a time (ie ripping a cd AND playing music is impossible), the list goes on.

For Sony to be successful they need to drop sonicstage now. it is utter garbage. They either need to design a piece of software that has the basic features common to any music jukebox program or they need to partner with Microsoft, Real, MusicMatch to give those programs the ability to sync to sony products.

What are you talking about?

[ackerholm]

"Did you know that with all the various products that Sony sells that the Playstation division is basically carrying the entire company?" ..and you can of course point to a source for this "fact".

This piece seems to suggest you're lying: http://www.forbes.com/home/feeds/afx/2005/10/27/af x2302512.html [forbes.com]

Operating profit for Sony march-september 2005: 50.98 billion yen
Operating profit for Sony gaming division: 2.3 billion yen

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you like. - Mark Twain

Re:I dunno...

[mikolas]

Actually you should see what Samsung Electronics did a few years back. They used to have the same kind of silo organization that Sony has, but the management decided to break the structure in order to add internal co-operation. The results were great and Samsung came out of the Asian financial crisis as one of the most innovative businesses. Wired has a nice story [wired.com] about it.

Re:What a shame

[MysteriousPreacher]

Alternatively you could end up getting killed doing this since it's probably going to be a live adjustment.