Comment by nakedrobot2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nakedrobot2 | Hacker News Reader

The issue is a simple one. What brought Sony down is the thing that brings down all huge companies: they failed to adapt.

All Sony's great successes were in hardware. Mechanical hardware. The walkman, etc. were all mechanical devices, without any software. Sony was the king of beautiful mechanical electronics. Before the computer age took hold.

The iPod, etc. are software devices. Yes, they also have beautiful industrial design, but Sony is capable of that. But Sony is not capable of software.

By the way, Nokia is going down for the same reason.

I think Sony's pathologies are somewhat different (although software is clearly a weakness). What makes for blockbuster consumer friendly technologies is often fundamentally opposed to what makes big content happy. As the influence of big content grew at Sony, they began to get veto power on future platforms.

The old Sony had gone to the Supreme Court to fight for consumers right to record tv shows. The new Sony bet big on the profit maximizing MD platform while mp3 friendly CD-R's and later iPods ate their lunch. They even led the reactionary effort to save big content's profits with rootkits.

Sony's biggest bright spot in the 90's was the Playstation business but even here we see the same sorts of problems cropping up -- PS3 had to push Blue Ray, late to online gaming, the Hotz fiasco.

Ps3 you surely mean that had to push blue ray. PS2 was DVD (and hard drive) only.

Interesting is that with all the rage of PS3 Sony haven't managed to move as much PS3 as the PS2. But PS2 was a hardware gem.

As a former Sony fanboy, I'm eager to agree. They're stuck in a mindset of presenting users with a boxful of cool hardware, and baffled by the notion that users actually want an intuitive comprehensive UI/UX to go with it.

Three Sony anecdotes I hope someone can learn from & act on:

1. Every DVD/Bluray player has a "Play" button. Press Eject, insert disc, push tray in, wait for menu to appear...why then does pressing Play not do anything? Why must I hunt down the remote to press the unmarked "Enter" button to play the movie when there's a Play button on the device I'm in arm's reach of because I just stuck the disc in? Yes, I know there's some technical explanation - I don't care, I just stuck the disc in and want to make it play the movie now without further fiddling.

2. My disc player has WiFi built in (that so many Sony products claim such support, then require purchase of a separate device-specific adapter costing nearly as much as the device is another rant). Nearly every time it does a network operation, it pops up a "Network Operation Complete [OK]" message, requiring me to acknowledge the fact it did what I told it to - rather than going on and doing the obvious next step. Get on with the action already.

3. The slew of "apps" built in are...ugly. Worst offender by far was the promotion for Salt (movie released just as the device was on the market): here I've got a flagship product from the company, trying to show itself off with clips from a big-budget blockbuster movie they own all rights to, hardware capable of pristine 1080p, and they're running the video at...scaled-up VGA super-grainy low-bandwidth streaming? Eeeeewwwww.

I rant because these are representative of so many other in-kind idiocies I keep running into on otherwise very satisfying products, belying a chronic lack of concern for actual use of the products. Indeed, they're still in the mindset of the Walkman: insert tape, push play, no further interaction; that world ended long ago.

>By the way, Nokia is going down for the same reason.

Given that Nokia was able to adapt enough to come up with Nokia Maps [1] (Decent mapping app with free offline maps), Nokia Music, Intuitive camera apps; I must disagree with that statement.

[1] http://here.com/

[2] http://www.nokia.com/us-en/support/product/nokia-music/

Nokia bought NAVTEQ. Is Maps because of adapt Nokia engineering or because of this acquisition?

Both. They did get a foothold from the acquisition of NAVTEQ but a lot of missing features such as real-time traffic, street view and satellite imagery needed to be integrated. This was completed with the help from Bing.

The offline maps is truly a blessing. Running low on battery but still en route? Switch off 4G and Wifi, the biggest battery suckers, and the navigation still works without any hiccup. The last time I was visiting a foreign country and had no data service, it came in handy too.

Exactly. Nokia have been innovating, they adopted Windows Phone which is great. But they've still flopped in the marketplace. It's far more complex than "their software isn't good".

the issue here is clearly one of failing to adapt to change (as it so often is), but i’d characterize it as having more to do with a shift from isolated products (hardware and software) to connected ecosystems..

> By the way, Nokia is going down for the same reason.

true, but nokia seems to have realized this early-on and, in fact, has been adapting..

while heavily criticized, their decision to abandon in-house platform development in favour of windows phone for smart devices is increasingly looking to be a wise one. they clearly get that devices (no matter how great they are in terms of build quality and software features) aren’t being measured in the market in isolation. device-specific features are part of it, but how it plays with other devices and services plays a big (and increasingly important) role..

this is what sony doesn't seem to get.. they have their own systems powering playstation-branded products, windows pcs and tablets, android tablets and smartphones, and a bunch of other devices (cameras, tvs, ...) and none of them play well with one another. they like to tout their rebranded 'sony entertainment network' as unifying their devices and leveraging their media assets but i've yet to see it take shape in any meaningful way. i've long been a fan of sony products but this lack of integration among products (and an apparent lack of vision to do so in the future) pushed me away.

> i've long been a fan of sony products but this lack of integration among products (and an apparent lack of vision to do so in the future) pushed me away

They integrate using standard protocols (HDMI CEC, DLNA, etc) and have to adhere to those limitations. I guess the alternative is going the proprietary way like Apple, but then everyone gets up in arms as well. It's lose-lose.

that's true, but i think there can be a middle-ground..

apple represents one extreme by locking-down everything to its ecosystem and connecting devices using proprietary technologies.

i’d say sony's integration, by these means, lies on the opposite end of the spectrum and isn't really integration (by my definition at least) - as it offers no real benefits in using their products together over mixing them with competing ones.

a middle-ground would be to support standard protocols while adding-in some tighter level of integration (more-so in terms of software and services than hardware connectivity) that make owning all sony products better than mixing them with others. if its compelling enough, i feel such integration can create a strong lock-in effect.

that being said, it seems very hard to do. the only companies that appear to have the scale and expertise to build-out compelling ecosystem’s (consisting of an underlying platform, applications, services, and integrated devices) are apple, microsoft, and google.. samsung seems to have realized this, and done quite well leveraging it to the max (nokia as well, though it’s a bit early to judge), but sony seems to have lost its way and is trying to both leverage existing platforms while competing with itself in building-out its own..

Sony did try connected ecosystems. They did it early, did it proprietary, did it wrong, and customers went elsewhere. They tried gluing everything together with MemoryStick and ATRAC. Everything, and I mean everything, had a MS slot: TVs, pens (!), CD players...whether it made sense or not. Anything that did audio pressured users to adopt ATRAC, with grudging allowance for MP3. MS was too pricy for anyone else to adopt, so it lost out to CompactFlash & SD. ATRAC was just inferior. Once those fell, Sony had nothing tying products together, and the walled garden went to weeds.

They lost sight of why ecosystem components are linked. Having gotten severely burned, they were shy to adapt and rebuild the necessary cross-platform infrastructure.

> They lost sight of why ecosystem components are linked. Having gotten severely burned, they were shy to adapt and rebuild the necessary cross-platform infrastructure.

i think you hit the nail on the head there. connectivity for connectivity's sake doesn't produce much value. its having everything work together in a way that makes the experience better for the end-user that really matters.

> By the way, Nokia is going down for the same reason.

Nokia is actually in a situation similar to Sony - it owns part of Nokia Siemens Networks, which is now a major cash cow. Selling handsets could become a sideshow for Nokia.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732350100457839...

I think Nokia would like to spin off NSN while their brand of IMS technology is still in fashion.

The big networking vendors used to compete generationally like companies in other fields (think GE and Lockheed with Jet Engines). This is still the case and two of the dominant vendors, NSN and Ericsson, have great current generation products.

The question is: will the next be the same as the last one, or will the next network be different?

From my knowledge of the industry, I can tell you that the client demands are changing and now would be the best time to unload NSN, at the height of their value cycle.

If you're pessimistic about NSN's long-term network strategy, sell. If You believe they've got it figured out, why would you sell your cash cow?

Disclaimer: I work at 2600hz, the cloud telecom company. We work with a number of infrastructure companies to design cloud telecom applications and deploy them on things like aws.

The thing is that the competition is fierce in this field. To see that, just look at the number of mergers: Nokia and Siemens, Alcatel and Lucent etc.

The chinese companies such as Huawei and ZTE lowered the margins and really shook the market some years ago.

Personally, I don't imagine a bright future for those companies. So I'm with the selling strategy. I worked at a competitor of those companies based in Brazil. The scenario wasn't pretty when I left.

Samsung also have terrible software, but they're doing great. I agree their software is a huge weakness, but having great software clearly isn't instrumental for success.

Sony just don't have the profit margins they need in stuff like TV, audio, etc. They also have really weak marketing in the phone space (their phones are on par with Samsung in hardware, and have a less-molested version of Android, but nobody knows they exist).

Their complete loss in the music player space though can be largely attributed to owning a music publishing arm. DRM killed all their (pretty decent) digital music players.

"All Sony's great successes were in hardware. Mechanical hardware."

There's a similar conclusion from this BBC report titled "What happened to Japan's electronic giants?"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-21992700

Interesting to read from the above link that Hitachi, also once known for it's consumer electronics products, is now focusing on heavy engineering as the core of its business (gas turbines, steam turbines, nuclear power plants, and high-speed trains).

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