[AnotherCat]

@Barty, I agree.

I cannot really criticise Sony for getting into what has turned out to be a niche market inappropriate to a very large multinational, as they were selling eReaders around 4 years before tablets and smart phones appeared and then going on to be the threat those have become (even from Sony's own phones and tablets), but I perhaps could, if I was a shareholder, for perservering with eReaders for so long (and it is a general criticism by Sony shareholders that it has persevered too long down some other tracks too).

It always surprises me how some people react with anger and critical "advice" on how the business would have worked well with better management and marketing, better product development, etc. when a business decides to discontinue or sell some part of that business.

By way of example a few years back I was engaged by a privately owned holding company to recover one of its subsidiary companies which was unprofitable. We returned it to profitability and the options going forward were to keep the company or sell it; the services it provided were not a fit with their other businesses (which, among other things made it expensive to manage), so the decision was made to sell it as a going concern. It sold immediately and appropriately to a multinational that specialised in the type of business throughout the world.

So, the nub of this story is the anger and sense of exaggerated self entitlement from some customers over the sale was amazing, both myself and the private owners got many phone calls, some just plain abusive, and correspondence criticising the sale. I even took a call from the manager of a non-profit organisation to whom we always supplied all of the services they ever wanted from us free; if anything one would expect a thank you for those donated services, but instead I got a tirade of abuse for allowing the company to be sold.

The strange thing was that if we had been providing poor services the customers would have been phoning to say how glad they were that someone else was now going to better run the business. Abusing us for not continuing with the business ourselves we could only take as an indicator that we had been well liked.

I see the same sort of whining from some Sony users. From my own selfish point of view I too would have liked to see Sony continue with readers but recognise it would likely have be silly for them to do so regardless of how well that business was run.