What happened to Sony?
When I was writing my little diatribe on the iPhone, I tried to give a decent summation about Apple and Google and mentioned that I’d like to do this to other Companies. I thought the first cab off the rank would be Sony.
I’d like to preface what I’m about to write by saying that this is not an objective post, it is colored quite heavily by my frustrations with Sony; I want Sony to be something much greater than they have become. But let’s leave that for later.
Sony was THE brand when I was growing up. Sony products were sold at a price premium over other brands, but they gained the reputation for giving you what you paid for. Their products were better designed and made and lasted longer and did more than the other brands. Slowly, as they became dominant, they started to assert themselves in ways that were not good for consumers (remember the VCR format wars) but customers still tended to forgive them because they made good, nicely designed things.
Sony was an innovator, and was heavily involved in the creation of the CD, the 3.5 inch floppy disk (kids, ask your parents), Digital Video formats and helped drive Japanese industry to the forefront of electronics and manufacturing.
After the rise of other Asian manufacturers, Sony started to change everything good they were doing without changing everything bad they were doing. They looked at everything that made them unique and systematically removed them, except one thing: Price. Sony’s brand seemed to wane in general perception, but Sony has kept stolidly doing the same thing over and over. More importantly, they kept their attitude and the arrogance that built up from those days which was sadly misplaced now that they weren’t the company, and the landscape was not the same as, it had been 10-15 years earlier.
Fast-forward to today, and Sony posts a massive loss and Sir Howard Stringer, CEO of Sony blames the earthquake, competition and a ton of other things which makes me think he doesn’t really know what is wrong. I know what is wrong, people like me are done with Sony as a brand.
I have owned a Sony PS3 for a long time. The way they’ve handled themselves, even aside from the hacking scandal, has been average at best. This very expensive machine was supposed to be a hub that did everything, games, video, pictures, but it stayed as one thing really: a game machine first and a blu-ray player a distant second. Don’t get me wrong, its a great game machine, but the whole cross-media bar navigation system is terrible, and the functionality of those other portions of it is patchy and can be hair-tearingly frustrating as the device spits obscure error codes at you. It can, in theory, stream DLNA video (in EXACTLY the right format, or another error code is diplayed) from your computer, but is broken in firmware upgrades so frequently that I’m ready to give up on it (I can buy a $150 blu-ray player that’ll do far more in terms of streaming). In short this device has never lived up to what Sony sold it as.
Add to this the hacking scandal, where Sony lied to its customer base and waited several days before owning up. The reduction of allowable PSN content sharing. The removal of PS2 backwards compatibility. The removal of other OS functionality. The EULA that forbids class actions (in the wake of the hacking scandal). The heavy handed approach to the security researchers that showed Sony’s own stupidity caused the PS3 system to be insecure. All these show a lack of respect to their customer base that is astonishing.
This is similar to another Sony device I own, the PSP. I bought this on the day it came out in Australia. I even drove a long way to pick it up and waited for the store to open in order to pick it up. But again, it was disappointing and oversold. The first-generation PSP has a battery life so short, you cannot play it for any length of time without it being plugged in; in short it was a non-portable portable. This device lasted about a month before it broke for the first (of many) times. I know far too many people with similar stories.
The headline game promised by Sony at the launch of the console, Gran Turismo PSP, took 5 years to be delivered which leads everybody, including me, to believe that Sony just flat-out lied at the launch and it never existed until much later. Talk about over-promising and under-delivering.
Given my experience with these two devices, Sony is going to have a hard time convincing me to buy a Vita and/or a PS4. I’d rather spend my money somewhere else, and that is the real problem for the Sony brand. If Sony cannot get someone who was basically brainwashed into believing that Sony was great from a young age to buy their products, what chance do they have of convincing younger people, without that lean towards Sony to do this?
Sony doesn’t respect their customers enough, oversells what they create and is now creating products less reliable than other manufacturers while still charging more. That is what went wrong; perhaps Sir Howard should not be so quick to blame earthquakes.
