Sony Style = Crap!

*sigh*

Sony, sony sony. Stupid sony.

You were a prestigious brand name in the ‘80s. People the world over sought your quality electronics, and back in the day, your Walkmans were innotative, and The Thing to Have.

You remember the Walkman, don’t you? At the time of its launch in 1979, it was The Shit. It commanded a high price for the time period, and if you had one, you were In. The rest of us made do with off-brands and knock-offs, like Coby and GPX. And if you were really broke, you had the lowest of the low: a Yorx.

But nowadays, there’s no question. The Must Have media device is the iPod. it is The Shit. And you’re In if you have one. Those who can’t afford one make do with, well, Coby, or GPX.

And, if you’re truly lame… you get a Sony Walkman.

Sony, you are now the Yorx of 2008.

You used to be golden. What happened to you?

The first sign of trouble was the whole minidisc thing. Yeah, it caught on in Japan, but nowhere else was it a big hit. Yet, you slogged on, insisting on trying to market it even as MP3 players started hitting the market, and the golden age of Napster was upon us. Putting all your eggs in the basket of what was basically a glorified digital version of a cassette player, when MP3 trading was rampant? Sony, WTF?

There are many other examples of your continued stubbornness and ineptitude. Even after Minidisc was relegated to a slow death in the world of niche markets, you insisted that its recording standard, ATRAC, was the wave of the future. Your products wouldn’t play MP3s… oh no! You had to convert to ATRAC, first so that you could control the experience with that oppressive DRM. Yeah, like users really wanted to “check out” their music, preventing playback on their computer as long as their music was “checked out” on the portable player. Real smart!

But let’s not dwell too much on the past. Let’s look at today. Hmmm, let’s see. Overpriced products? Check. Poor marketing? Check. Support that sucks balls? Check. Ridiculous fees that users must pay to improve their experience? Check!

Let’s examine that last one: ridiculous fees. So, you’re trying to sell people on the Vaio brand. In an age where Wintel PCs are a commodity, nearly a throw-away consumable item, you feel that marking up the price, adding a little external stylistic flare, and nearly filling up the hard drive with all kinds of Sony-branded bloatware justifies doubling or even tripling the retail price of the hardware. Then! You have the balls to try and charge customers $49 for the privilege of “fresh start” software that removes the bloat. Once again, I ask: Sony, WTF?

Thankfully, you’ve since backtracked on the whole bloatware-removal thing. But the fact that the higher-ups even considered charging – let alone, putting all that promotional crap in there in the first place – seems to me to be evidence that you’re still out of touch. I mean, REALLY, what are people like me supposed to think when I read this stuff?

Sony earlier justified the fee by saying it covers removal of the unwanted software before shipment.

HUH?! How about this, douchebag: don’t put the unwanted software on the machine to begin with! That should save you TONS of money!

Then there’s this:

Customers opting for Sony’s Fresh Start could miss out on software including Microsoft Works, bundled with a trial version of Microsoft Office; Sony’s Vaio Creation Suite Photo Software with a Corel Paint Shop Pro trial version; the Click to Disc video editor WinDVD; and an edition of QuickBooks Simple Start that tracked only 20 customers.

Ho Ho! Why would I POSSIBLY want to miss out on Microsoft Works?! I mean that software is used by… okay well, nobody except the cheapest of cheapskates, or the laziest of potential software pirates. My job would probably fire me if I had the cheapskate-audacity to start sending my work in using not the ubiquitous .doc, .xls and .ppt formats, but the maligned and unworkable .wks and .wps formats that NO ONE knows exists (even I had to Google it).

And Corel Paint Shop Pro? Yeah, real quality there, Sony. Corel hasn’t been relevant in almost a decade.

Sony, it’s not about loading your computers with junk and getting people to think it’s all the rage. It’s clear you WANT once again to sell chic, stylish equipment and you want people to WANT your wares. But you can’t do that by loading run of the mill computers with junk that no one wants, and then thinking you can charge them $50 to remove it.

If you want to sell premium products, you have to MAKE premium products. I don’t want to pay $3,000 for something that looks like it came out of the 1980s, when for $399 an iPhone will do the same thing.

Yeah, that’s right, Sony. I said the “i” word. You can bash the iPhone all you like, but what have you come up with? A cheaply-made, Windows-Mobile-running iPhone copy? Oh wait… it’s not even even out yet.

Let’s at least hope when the X1 does come out, you don’t screw it up like the technological abortion once known as the Clie NZ-90. This was a device ahead of its time and I owned one. At first, it was a GREAT device, almost four years ahead of its time. Too bad the keyboard was unusable, the software was buggy, and later bug fixes weren’t part of the ROM, but took up RAM… taking up nearly all of the 2MB of available RAM and leaving you with around 128K or so. The only alternative was to pick the patches for the bugs you really hated, and just put up with everything else that was wrong. Oh yeah, the battery life sucked, and then you discontinued the thing after 8 months, refusing to support those who paid the $799 to own this thing. Thanks, Sony.

But I digress. The bottom line is, you can start listening to your customers and rise to stardom once again, perhaps even surpassing the shiny aluminum sheen-veneered hotness that is Apple these days. or you can continue to sell overpriced junk and see your fortunes continue to fall, and your stores continue to be empty. It’s your call.

P.S.: Don’t fuck up your DVCAM tape-based HD Video camera line. At least you’re doing THAT right. That direct-to-DVD junk can go, though.