[fjtorres]

I've pointed out before that, back in 2007, Sony had all the elements necessary to big a major player in ebooks; good hardware, an adequate ebookstore, and a proprietary format.
And they had a 2-year lead on Amazon and their frumpy Kindle 1.

They were masters of their own fate but instead of betting on their own ecosystem, as they do in the video game arena, they chose to bet on "interoperability" and somebody else's ecosystem, surrendering total control over the customer experience and trying to compete solely on hardware merit.

They are hardly the only (or even first) company to fritter away early market domination by betting on multiplatform interoperability but they do present the biggest missed oportunity (so far) this century.

We can only wonder what might've been if they had chosen to go toe to toe with Amazon on ebooks and tried to build up their lrf bookstore instead of wasting the better part of a year relaunching their business. At a minimum, the shift to near-cost reader pricing in 2010 wouldn't have hurt them as badly.

The real money in ebooks is in the content, just as in gaming, but Sony gave it up and bet on hardware instead.