Quote:
Originally Posted by EatingPie
The fact of the matter is, Sony makes billions more money from TVs and games (literally), so those areas get more resources, and have for years. YEARS! The Reader is new, small, and -- let's face it -- risky and not nearly as profitable. And in any company, this means less resources and support. As I said, it's felt like that from the PRS-500 all the way to now. I don't think it had a single thing to do with Amazon, since this sort of "low key presence" pre-dated the Kindle for year and a half.
-Pie
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+1
Plus:
Sony has been and remains in bad financial shape for years now.
(They've also frittered away a *lot* of value and are still losing it:
http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/co...2010/19560366/)
They need high-visibility winners to build back their lost reputation; selling a million book readers isn't going to get them there. So their attention and resources goes elsewhere.
They need money and they need gobs of it; TVs and gaming consoles move billions--ebook readers, millions. That's a couple orders of magnitude. TVs and consoles are mature, well-understood businesses, whereas ebooks are an emerging business that is being actively *resisted* by the entrenched publishing oligarchs. Hard to argue for resources at HQ.
If anything, the Sony Reader guys were lucky to get the readers included in last year's holiday TV advertising campaign.
So, no, Kindle didn't marginalize Sony--they did it to themselves.
Amazon just did two things:
1- They copied Sony's business model and stepped into the void Sony's inaction had created.
2- They *executed*. They've stuck with their model and never blinked; they've evolved their product and supported it to the hilt.
But then, to Amazon, Kindle is *central* to their survival.
To Sony, the Readers are just a minor side bet.
All that remains now is to see what the 350/650/950 bring to the game.
But the names themselves suggest incremental gains rather than generational change so I'm not holding my breath for any revolutionary new feature.