MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - How the Tech Parade Passed Sony By - ?the end of Sony eReaders, the end of Sony?

HansTWN · 04-14-2012, 10:15 PM

There definitely is more to it than price. Sony did make very beautiful, functional, and innovative products. I have one of the SZ series laptops. It was way, way ahead of its time. Extremely light and thin, carbon fibre shell, good battery life. Then innovation stopped and greed took over. They overloaded their PCs with adware which slowed them to a crawl, and the average user didn't know how to remove these useless programs. They fed the user a steady diet of incremental spec upgrades, instead of new designs (sure reminds me of some other high flyers today!). We bought a small 11.1" laptop for my wife later, the build quality is lousy.

They wasted billions on Blu-Ray (which is dead in the water due to direct downloads and streaming) and the TV section went downhill, too. They just bought the panels and slapped their brand name on them.

A sad story, but I don't see them turning it around. Japan in general seems to be full of companies who couldn't turn the corner when the tide turned and they lost their original competitive edge. I see same thing happening for industrial machinery, too.

04-14-2012, 10:15 PM	#6
HansTWN Wizard Posts: 4,538 Karma: 264065402 Join Date: Jun 2009 Location: Taiwan Device: HP Touchpad, Sony Duo 13, Lumia 920, Kobo Aura HD	There definitely is more to it than price. Sony did make very beautiful, functional, and innovative products. I have one of the SZ series laptops. It was way, way ahead of its time. Extremely light and thin, carbon fibre shell, good battery life. Then innovation stopped and greed took over. They overloaded their PCs with adware which slowed them to a crawl, and the average user didn't know how to remove these useless programs. They fed the user a steady diet of incremental spec upgrades, instead of new designs (sure reminds me of some other high flyers today!). We bought a small 11.1" laptop for my wife later, the build quality is lousy. They wasted billions on Blu-Ray (which is dead in the water due to direct downloads and streaming) and the TV section went downhill, too. They just bought the panels and slapped their brand name on them. A sad story, but I don't see them turning it around. Japan in general seems to be full of companies who couldn't turn the corner when the tide turned and they lost their original competitive edge. I see same thing happening for industrial machinery, too. Last edited by HansTWN; 04-15-2012 at 02:56 AM.