page44
22
cory doctorow
That was good business — even if Sony lost the Betamax-
VHS format wars, the money on the world-with-VCRs table was
enough to make up for it.
But then Sony acquired a relatively tiny entertainment com-
pany and it started to massively screw up. When MP3 rolled
around and Sony’s Walkman customers were clamoring for a
solid-state MP3 player, Sony let its music business-unit run its
show: instead of making a high-capacity MP3 Walkman, Sony
shipped its Music Clips, low-capacity devices that played brain-
damaged DRM formats like Real and OpenMG. They spent good
money engineering “features” into these devices that kept their
customers from freely moving their music back and forth be-
tween their devices. Customers stayed away in droves.
Today, Sony is dead in the water when it comes to Walkmen.
The market leaders are poky Singaporean outfits like Creative
Labs — the kind of company that Sony used to crush like a bug,
back before it got borged by its entertainment unit — and PC
companies like Apple.
That’s because Sony shipped a product that there was no
market demand for. No Sony customer woke up one morning and
said, “Damn, I wish Sony would devote some expensive engineer-
ing effort in order that I may do less with my music.” Presented
with an alternative, Sony’s customers enthusiastically jumped
ship.
The same thing happened to a lot of people I know who used
to rip their CDs to WMA. You guys sold them software that pro-
duced smaller, better-sounding rips than the MP3 rippers, but
you also fixed it so that the songs you ripped were device-locked
to their PCs. What that meant is that when they backed up their
music to another hard drive and reinstalled their OS (something
that the spyware and malware wars has made more common than
ever), they discovered that after they restored their music they
Content 2nd gal final.indd 22
7/4/08 9:56:29 AM