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Interesting John C. Dvorak article on the decline of Sony

Michael Hastings

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Interesting John C. Dvorak article on the decline of Sony

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2385789,00.asp

in the late seventies, early eighties Sony was the RED of the television industry. RCA was the long time leader in Cameras, VTRs, etc. In the space of a few short years, they went from dominant to completely shutting down their television business - in large part because Sony took over with Betacam, Chip cameras, digital recording, etc.

Now it looks as if RED, Canon, (and maybe GoPro) will do the same to Sony.
 
Interesting article, thanks for the link. I remember reading something very close to this back in 2005 or 2006, right as the Playstation 3 was about to come out. The gist of that article centered around how Sony was pinning much of its hopes on the success of the console and how similar internal politics lead to big time lost opportunities. As crazy as it sounds, I wonder if they'll still be around (as we know them now) in another 5 or 6 years?!
 
Gloom and Doom aside...yes they will still be around. They have business segments that are still making solidly marketable products: F3 as an example. But how healthy they will be in 5-6 years? Probably not as healthy as they wish. 2012 will be a hard year for Sony. Scarlet will plunder the F3 market, and Epic will pillage a significant portion of what's left of its hi-end CineAlta market. But Sony is a BIG elephant, and will take a long long time to die or be reborn after they have lost all semblance of market leadership.
 
Sony is a huge beast, with many arms, so they'll be fine. But they aren't Microsoft. They aren't Apple. They might very well be disappearing eventually, and not as late as you might think...

The problem I see with Sony is while they get some things right, and some things wrong, they don't ever really seem to be able to do anything great.
PS3, for example, had the power, the exclusives, and all the free internet it could ever need, but what it lacked was a stronger, unified, marketing angle - some cleverness could have helped - and development tools. Yes, development tools. How can one forget something like that? Their attitude is far too last gen, not catching up with what is changing or what has changed. Microsoft, with the XBOX360, of course didn't neglect that at all - they've been fostering a strong developer oriented market for years. Nintendo... well, you can at the very least agree that their marketing department is very very good at getting shit sold.

F3 is looking damn nice though, even though I am not planning on getting one unless EPIC-S gets delayed beyond next winter, in which case yeah, it's an option. :-)
 
Michael Hastings said:
I
in the late seventies, early eighties Sony was the RED of the television industry. RCA was the long time leader in Cameras, VTRs, etc. In the space of a few short years, they went from dominant to completely shutting down their television business - in large part because Sony took over with Betacam, Chip cameras, digital recording, etc.

Now it looks as if RED, Canon, (and maybe GoPro) will do the same to Sony.
Click to expand...

Since this is RedUser, I hope you're not implying that history repeats itself and that 20 years or so from now a new upstart will come along that will do the same to Red....
 
Yes, very interesting. I remember when "you never get in trouble for buying Sony." Now it's like- "yeah, we made a whole movie without anything Sony!"
 
I love Sony, but it started dying about ten years ago.
Example: Digi-Beta should have been the standard in SD but they dropped the ball.
They had too many products introduced to ward off competitive threats instead of being the leader.
Then Korean industry stepped up to the plate and worked their asses off. Besides that, most
of the old guard of the Japanese Keiretsu passed away and that's a broad statement that includes
Sony.
Let's hope they'll still be around to enrich our lives with cool products, like our beloved RED.
 
Erik Franzén said:
Sony is a huge beast, with many arms, so they'll be fine. But they aren't Microsoft. They aren't Apple. They might very well be disappearing eventually, and not as late as you might think...

The problem I see with Sony is while they get some things right, and some things wrong, they don't ever really seem to be able to do anything great.
PS3, for example, had the power, the exclusives, and all the free internet it could ever need, but what it lacked was a stronger, unified, marketing angle - some cleverness could have helped - and development tools. Yes, development tools. How can one forget something like that? Their attitude is far too last gen, not catching up with what is changing or what has changed. Microsoft, with the XBOX360, of course didn't neglect that at all - they've been fostering a strong developer oriented market for years. Nintendo... well, you can at the very least agree that their marketing department is very very good at getting shit sold.

F3 is looking damn nice though, even though I am not planning on getting one unless EPIC-S gets delayed beyond next winter, in which case yeah, it's an option. :-)
Click to expand...

You're right about development tools. You can get free ones (Vistual Studio express) for starters.
 
I think Sony is responding, just slowly. It won't be the Scarlett that steals F3 thunder, it will be the Epic-S. 4K vs 1080p for similar price? Plus all the technical goodies? No contest.
Still.. they are going to sell a lot of F3s and FS100's before the Epic-S ships. Plus Sony has claimed they will provide high quality uprezzing to their existing formats. Remains to be seen
how well that will work, or if anyone want's to pay for it.

On the other hand, they have made some excellent improvements to Sony Vegas Pro, including support for OpenCL and OpenFX.

Info....Vegas suite, Acid Pro and Sound Forge all come from the development team based in Madison WI.
 
David Collard said:
I love Sony, but it started dying about ten years ago.
Example: Digi-Beta should have been the standard in SD but they dropped the ball.
They had too many products introduced to ward off competitive threats instead of being the leader.
Then Korean industry stepped up to the plate and worked their asses off. Besides that, most
of the old guard of the Japanese Keiretsu passed away and that's a broad statement that includes
Sony.
Let's hope they'll still be around to enrich our lives with cool products, like our beloved RED.
Click to expand...

How exactly was digibeta not the standard in SD? Dr. Who was still shooting on it up until 2009!
 
Shooting on Digital Betacam didn't take off in the U.S. like it should have for the simple reason that Sony sold so many Beta-SP camcorders in the U.S. and people basically drove them into the ground, used them for years and years, and apparently U.S. broadcasters didn't mind Beta-SP quality. I shot a number of infomercials and EPK stuff around 1992-1998 and recalled being unable to convince any production company to shoot on Digital Betacam instead of Beta-SP after Digital Betacam was introduced. In fact, some of them switched to cheaper DV products after Beta-SP, never touched Digital Betacam except as for tape masters.

However, Wikipedia says that Digital Betacam was the most successful videotape format ever introduced -- the camera version took off better in Europe than in the U.S. and of course, all the post houses embraced it.
 
Digi-Beta for post and master tapes was somewhat of a standard, but as a percentage for origination
it was perhaps 10%.
Don't confuse what was the best with what was the most common usage.
Under different circumstances, Panasonic would've thrown in the towel instead of compete,
but Sony rested on their laurels for too long and did not market it aggressively, so the price points
never came down and competition came along.
Interesting to hear that standard def PAL was being used on Doctor Who in England.
 
Sorry, just have to add another thing the David Mullen correctly pointed out...
Betacam-SP kept going and going and then DV came along (better get a bucket) to fight
off the Panasonic offerings. DVC-PRO blah blah. DVCAM, blah blah.
Most producers wouldn't invest in the Digi-Beta, even though it was a superior format for originating ,because of the relative high
costs associated with the production flow. So, what I contend is that had Sony pushed the digi-beta brand
more aggressively with better pricing for decks etc., all those crappy brands like DV, DVC-PRO, DVCAM, Beta-SX and whatever
would've been the "also-ran" instead of the predominant cluster of crap.

Hey, still loving Sony and I miss Akio Morita and the gang. Rest in Peace fellows.
Long live Sony.
 
Paul Nordin said:
Gloom and Doom aside...yes they will still be around. They have business segments that are still making solidly marketable products: F3 as an example.
Click to expand...

The F3 seems like a joke to me. It's 3 year old technology that's selling for 4x's it's value. There was no reason that the F3 couldn't have had some form of RAW video or Prores internal recording capabilities... instead they gave it some broadcast craptastic codec with a lower bit-rate than a $800 Rebel T2i from Best Buy. Don't get me wrong, I don't have anything against 4:2:0 color space... it's not bad for most situations, but in a $15,000 cinema camera with PL mounts? Come on. Sure, it's capable of S-log with 4:4:4 recording, but that requires what? A dual-sdi off-board recorder? What is this 1998? The F3 is nothing but an elitists wet dream.

Consumer products are just on a faster development cycle than pro gear. There are more customers and more money. It's inevitable that in the next 2 generations of consumer still/video hybrids, they are going to surpass professional gear. It's just what happens with a free market. Sony is playing socialist dictator and "rationing" their products. That combined with their proprietary BS they love so much is nothing but a recipe for failure.
 
Today a Sony dealer I bumped into happened to mention that the new 4:4:4 recorder for the F3 is $9000.
Just saying. Not like I'm buying one.
 
Bryce O said:
The F3 seems like a joke to me. It's 3 year old technology that's selling for 4x's it's value..
Click to expand...

So how do you really feel Bryce? :) I'm certainly not defending Sony's product strategy, which I think sucks. But they are still the big gorilla in the room. Broadcasters eat thier pizza and drink their coolaide by the gallons. So they will sell a lot of F3s. Particuarly since Red is having difficulty with getting up to speed manufacturing competing products...products which would most likely eat the F3's lunch. Sony, Panasonic, Canon, etc. all make a practice of spoonfeeding new tech to us in small easily digestible chunks.

Like dog years, every forward step Sony takes is seeminly dwarfed by Red's sprint down the block.

In Sony's defense, they have a major advantage over Red in ability to deliver manufactured products that you can buy this morning and shoot with this afternoon.
 
I had the great misfortune to work for Sony Australia for a while, about 5 years ago.
Sony's Greatest.F*ckup.Ever was their idiotic "Network Walkman" range.
Their biggest problem was that while they desperately wanted to move into the burgeoning Solid State music player market, at the same time they were busily suing people (or trying to) for illegal copying of Sony copyrighted music.
Apparently their lawyers decided it wouldn't do for Sony to sell music players capable of playing the very pirated MP3 rips that they were squealing and pissing over in the courtrooms, so their answer was to have players that could only work with their proprietary ATRAC compression format, that would allow people to rip songs into the players, but not get them out again to share with unauthorized users.
That would have been vaguely reasonable, except that the only way to get anything into the players was to use the absolute garbage "Connect Player" software they supplied.
Connect Player simply would not work at all on about 60% of PCs, and when it did, was the most brain-damaged application anybody had ever seen, locking up PCs, causing other programs to crash, trashing the music files already in the player etc etc.
And how the hell they expected the players themselves to compete with iPods is another great mystery.
The Sony players looked like a half-sucked purple cough drop, with really-shitty looking chrome plated buttons, and a very limited single colour display.
By that time, iPods had colour TV screens, and vastly better access to the stored files...
I had to deal with mothers phoning us up to claim that (typically) "My son saved up for months to buy that damned thing, and he can't get it to work. Meanwhile his friend has an MP3 player he bought for three box tops and $9.95, and it works perfectly!!!"
And Sony kept coming up with "upgrades" to Connect Player which did SFA to fix any of the issues, and I strongly suspect the programmers were well and truly over it, and the only real differences were in the version numbers! In the end they abandoned Connect Player, and told people to use the older "Sonic Stage" software developed for their MiniDisc players (There's another stunning market success for them!)
Eventually, the entire Network Walkman development team were fired, and Sony started producing new players with revolutionary MP3 drag 'n' drop technology! But they never recovered.
I guess a large part of Apple's success is that not only does iTunes actually work, but it was completely free, and you didn't even need an iPod to take advantage of it...
 
David Collard said:
I love Sony, but it started dying about ten years ago. Example: Digi-Beta should have been the standard in SD but they dropped the ball.
Click to expand...

Gee, from my perspective (American network & cable TV shows), Digibeta was by far the dominant editing and delivery format for most of the 1990s and well into the 2000s. It was a very rock-solid, reliable format. I think I worked on at least 40 major network episodic series during that ten-year period, and all of them used Digibeta. It was certainly the standard here in LA, blowing away D1, BetaSP, and 1" in the process.

My observation was that Sony initially screwed-up when HD started rolling in 1999, and I think they lost a lot of ground to Panasonic's D5. But I think they quickly got the tape end of the business back with HDCam-SR, and now that dominates the broadcast business (the current lack of blank tape notwithstanding).

Where Sony now has problems is the transition to digital files, and the proliferation of fifty competitive cameras and formats. Sony's got a tough road to hoe, but there's still good people there.
 
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