Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
Spring 2008 to August 2009 was a whole year and more that Amazon was promoting a unified ecosystem. Hardware. Ebooks apps.
SONY?
They were talking up epub on the hardware while still trying to sell lrf in the bookstore.
They never said what they would do for customers of lrf books until after the switch. Who'd buy a format even Sony said had no future? And with DRM nobody had cracked? Not many, turned out. The finally got their store running in time for the conspiracy and the 4 hour price war.
The froze the store. For over a year.
And they froze their own market.
They osbourned their store at the worst possible time.
Now, it wasn't their fault that B&N stupidly destroyed the market for hardware-only vendors but if they hadn't killed their walled garden they would've had a chance once the rules changed. One of the advantages of proprietary formats is you control your own fate.
And Sony knew that!
Playstation is built on it.
They had the means to compete and threw it away.
|
You do know that the original nook was released in Nov. 2009? Kind of hard for it to seriously effect events that occurred before then.
Yes, as I said in my earlier post, Sony made some bad decisions and pretty much fell by the wayside because of those bad decisions, but all that happened before the Nook. By the time the Nook came out, Amazon already had something like 90% of the market. Sony had a year's lead time on Amazon, yet lost the market to Amazon within a short time. That takes some really bad decisions.
I can't blame Sony for their proprietary standard. After all, everyone had a proprietary standard at the start, including Sony and Amazon. Sony also supported the epub standard (without switching their bookstore to it) as soon as it came out (2009). Amazon still only supports their own format. Sony's problem was more that they made it difficult to buy books from them. That's what Amazon got and why Amazon won the battle. They made it easy to buy books, easy to get those books on the kindle and possible to buy books on a whim. They also understood that content was king and worked hard to make as many books as possible available, something Sony never got either.