How Steve Jobs 'out-Japanned' Japan or out-Sony'ed Sony
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Re: How Steve Jobs 'out-Japanned' Japan or out-Sony'ed Sony
#2Sony went corporate American.
After the Betamax debacle it decided it would win the next format war by owning studios.
That meant that anything it built for the consumer also had to be good for the studio. So for example it launched the excellent minidisk player (a 76Mb minifloppy) with better than MP3 quality when MP3 players were 32Mb for twice the price.
But it refused to release the minidisk drives for computers, because that would lead to piracy - so the only way to get music on the units was to buy all your albums again on minidisk (the studio's preferred option !) or record them on the microphone in. Then they did the same again with the PSP.
Suppose Apple had decided to ensure the success of the iPhone, not by making it great, but by buying a cell carrier - then limiting your calls to other iPhone users.
Re: How Steve Jobs 'out-Japanned' Japan or out-Sony'ed Sony
#3Sony went corporate American. After the Betamax debacle it decided it would win the next format war by owning studios. That meant that anything it built for the consumer also had to be good for the studio. So for example it launched the excellent minidisk player (a 76Mb minifloppy) with better than MP3 quality when MP3 players were 32Mb for twice the price. But it refused to release the minidisk drives for computers,…
Sort of like how you can't do squat with music/movies on iOS unless it's through iTunes?
Re: How Steve Jobs 'out-Japanned' Japan or out-Sony'ed Sony
#4Sony went corporate American. After the Betamax debacle it decided it would win the next format war by owning studios. That meant that anything it built for the consumer also had to be good for the studio. So for example it launched the excellent minidisk player (a 76Mb minifloppy) with better than MP3 quality when MP3 players were 32Mb for twice the price. But it refused to release the minidisk drives for computers,…
Sort of like how you can't do squat with music/movies on iOS unless it's through iTunes?
Pandora and Rhapsody seem to work just fine. Audible seems to have a nice app for all those audiobooks. Netflix also seems to work fine.
Re: How Steve Jobs 'out-Japanned' Japan or out-Sony'ed Sony
#5Sony went corporate American. After the Betamax debacle it decided it would win the next format war by owning studios. That meant that anything it built for the consumer also had to be good for the studio. So for example it launched the excellent minidisk player (a 76Mb minifloppy) with better than MP3 quality when MP3 players were 32Mb for twice the price. But it refused to release the minidisk drives for computers,…
Actually, I'm not sure they learned anything from Betamax. Other companies avoid format wars; Sony launches them, always hoping for license fees. Minidisc, ATRAC, Memory Stick, Digital8, UMD: all formats launched into crowded markets, usually with little or no advantage over the incumbents.
(I thought Blu-Ray was an example, but a quick Wikipedia check says Blu-Ray was announced 2 months before the DVD Forum voted to develop HD-DVD.)
They've won a few, too; most notably, 3.5" floppies (where Apple crowned the winner by choosing Sony for Mac).
Re: How Steve Jobs 'out-Japanned' Japan or out-Sony'ed Sony
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sort of like how you can't do squat with music/movies on iOS unless it's through iTunes?
Pandora and Rhapsody seem to work just fine. Audible seems to have a nice app for all those audiobooks. Netflix also seems to work fine.
Apple certainly could have made it easier to put any old video you want into iTunes, I think they made a strategic decision to coax people into purchasing video through iTunes by making it hard to just drop AVIs into it. If they had tried this with iTunes - come out with the music store before the player and limited you to only listening to music you bought through the store, they'd have been dead in the water. I'm sure they're more than happy with the sales of videos in iTunes but they certainly left a pretty wide hole where iTunes could have been the default video player for everything instead of just their own stuff.
Re: How Steve Jobs 'out-Japanned' Japan or out-Sony'ed Sony
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pandora and Rhapsody seem to work just fine. Audible seems to have a nice app for all those audiobooks. Netflix also seems to work fine.
Apple certainly could have made it easier to put any old video you want into iTunes, I think they made a strategic decision to coax people into purchasing video through iTunes by making it hard to just drop AVIs into it. If they had tried this with iTunes - come out with the music store before the player and limited you to only listening to music you bought through the store, they'd have been dead in the water. I'm s…
The version of the iTunes Music Store where people can put whatever media they want up for sale sounds, to me, as a consumer, less valuable than the single place I can go now to get almost any album on any label I normally listen to, or get the most recent episode of Parks & Rec. I'm sure there's great stuff on sale at flea markets too, but I don't want to shop there. Sorry.
Re: How Steve Jobs 'out-Japanned' Japan or out-Sony'ed Sony
#8I think from a larger view, it has always been easy to beat SONY. SONY as a company doesn't care about the customer AFTER they have purchased the item. Look at ANY software that comes with a device, it's simply awful if it works at all. Even the PS3 has iffy UI. I had a fantastic device for recording for my podcast, but getting the recording OFF the machine was almost impossible. The last version, ver. 3.2, had menu options that didn't do anything. Absolutely NOTHING, and that was version 3!
Beat SONY by making the inside as good as the outside. Simple.
Re: How Steve Jobs 'out-Japanned' Japan or out-Sony'ed Sony
#9Sony went corporate American. After the Betamax debacle it decided it would win the next format war by owning studios. That meant that anything it built for the consumer also had to be good for the studio. So for example it launched the excellent minidisk player (a 76Mb minifloppy) with better than MP3 quality when MP3 players were 32Mb for twice the price. But it refused to release the minidisk drives for computers,…
Sort of like how you can't do squat with music/movies on iOS unless it's through iTunes?
Not sure what your are trying to say or if you even use an iOS product. You can easily play music/movies not purchased through iTunes and there is other software out there that allows people to manage music/movies if they don't want to use iTunes. So no, it's really not the same thing at all.
Re: How Steve Jobs 'out-Japanned' Japan or out-Sony'ed Sony
#10Sony went corporate American. After the Betamax debacle it decided it would win the next format war by owning studios. That meant that anything it built for the consumer also had to be good for the studio. So for example it launched the excellent minidisk player (a 76Mb minifloppy) with better than MP3 quality when MP3 players were 32Mb for twice the price. But it refused to release the minidisk drives for computers,…
I bought an early Minidisk player (still have it), and you could record with it using ordinary line in RCA jacks. A microphone was not necessary. As a replacement for a cassette deck, it beat the pants off of it. Sadly, the copy protection on the disks (it wouldn't even let you do a bit copy of your own disk recordings) killed it.