Are Sony fooked?

[Dr Lobster*]

you may have read on the news that Sony made another thumping loss this year

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/20 ... nnual-loss

i remember fondly during the 1980s and to an extent the 1990s that if you wanted the best tv, stereo etc, you bought a Sony.

but these days, it's simply not the case. they've relied on the heritage and equity of their brand and completely ransacked it. they've gradually cut corners on the build quality and completely lost all innovation, i can't say i've handled or seen a sony product for many years that's made me go 'wow', i want one of those.

and apart from a Playstation 2 which i purchased about 2003/4 i can't say I've purchased a Sony product for years.

What are your memories of Sony? and what are your experiences of their gear these days?

[bilky asko]

you may have read on the news that Sony made another thumping loss this year

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/20 ... nnual-loss

i remember fondly during the 1980s and to an extent the 1990s that if you wanted the best tv, stereo etc, you bought a Sony.

but these days, it's simply not the case. they've relied on the heritage and equity of their brand and completely ransacked it. they've gradually cut corners on the build quality and completely lost all innovation, i can't say i've handled or seen a sony product for many years that's made me go 'wow', i want one of those.

and apart from a Playstation 2 which i purchased about 2003/4 i can't say I've purchased a Sony product for years.

What are your memories of Sony? and what are your experiences of their gear these days?

Simply put, I think Sony has lost its reputation as the byword of quality - particularly in the TV market - to companies like Panasonic. Quality is no good without innovation, and the perception of quality is no good without some quality to back it up.

[WillPS]

I think their losses have more to do with their business model being firmly based around "old media" products.They spent an unbelievable sum of money buying victory in the HD format war and I don't know if they'll ever get a return on that seeing as web-enabled TVs/games consoles, HD streaming services and broadband are turning the idea of owning physical media in to something of a novelty.

I have long held the opinion that buying a Sony telly is pretty daft seeing as all their panels are (or at least were) Samsungs - (at one stage Tesco sold an own-brand Technika, a Samsung and a Sony all using the same panel at vastly different price points). The holiday cottage we took in Wales last year had a recent Sony telly installed and I have to say I did like the deployment of the Xross menus - but unless you're a straight-forward Freeview viewer these are largely irrelevant. The only time I ever see my telly's interface is the volume controller - and it really doesn't bother me that it comes up in teletext style graphics rather than a nice gradient with a starburst at the end of it; the rest is all Sky+HD or TopUpTV.

They made some exceptionally poor moves with the PS3 also, massively over-specifying it meaning it took too long to get to market and when it did it made them no money as it was far too expensive to build.

My experiences of Sony have always been poor. Their build quality has been sub-par for as long as I've known them.

[lukey]

I certainly remember during the 90s that, as said, Sony was a byword for quality, particularly with TVs - where you thought in terms of "do I get 10 years out of this Sony or 3 years out of this Bush?" These days, this is clearly not the case. They've drifted out of relevance in so many of their traditional strongholds like TVs and Walkmen, and now they really only have SCE sitting in a bubble of its own (which I *think* is profitable).

Incidentally, my current TV is a Sony only because there was a particular deal on buying a Sony TV and Blu-ray together. But for this, it wouldn't have been on my radar, and I don't believe this TV is any better than the roughly-equivalent LG/Samsung/Panasonics I was entertaining at the time. What you might gain from 'Bravia Sync' (*gasp* as I pause a disc from the TV remote) is offset by weirdy esoteric UI design. Oh, and it shipped with a dead pixel. Did that sound a bit bitter? Fuckers.

[nwtv2003]

I must be the only person I know that is a it Sony mad, currently my main TV is a 26" LCD HD TV bought in 2007 that's still working like a dream, a Playstation 2, two Blu-Ray players, a docking station for my iPhone and a DVD/HDD recorder and that is the only dud device out of the lot. I take the old fashion view that Sony is a benchmark for quality, like they were during the 1990s and the classic Trinitron CRT TV range.

[Alexia]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3tZPH5m ... re=related

Guess the adverts didn't work then.

[bilky asko]

I think their losses have more to do with their business model being firmly based around "old media" products.They spent an unbelievable sum of money buying victory in the HD format war and I don't know if they'll ever get a return on that seeing as web-enabled TVs/games consoles, HD streaming services and broadband are turning the idea of owning physical media in to something of a novelty.

I have long held the opinion that buying a Sony telly is pretty daft seeing as all their panels are (or at least were) Samsungs - (at one stage Tesco sold an own-brand Technika, a Samsung and a Sony all using the same panel at vastly different price points). The holiday cottage we took in Wales last year had a recent Sony telly installed and I have to say I did like the deployment of the Xross menus - but unless you're a straight-forward Freeview viewer these are largely irrelevant. The only time I ever see my telly's interface is the volume controller - and it really doesn't bother me that it comes up in teletext style graphics rather than a nice gradient with a starburst at the end of it; the rest is all Sky+HD or TopUpTV.

They made some exceptionally poor moves with the PS3 also, massively over-specifying it meaning it took too long to get to market and when it did it made them no money as it was far too expensive to build.

My experiences of Sony have always been poor. Their build quality has been sub-par for as long as I've known them.

I don't know much about Panasonic's business model or their innovation, but their profit last year was $893m (~£564m). However, from what I can gather Panasonic loses quite a lot of money on its TV business.

[Dr Lobster*]

it's reassuring that it is indeed not just me that's noticed this. there was a pretty interesting article on the register about this today too.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/05/sony_hirai/

sony do make mobiles phones btw, there is one which i think can play old PS1 games (which in theory, if it's got decent controls should be a winner and what they should have focused on rather than the ill conceived vita) and a bunch of other handsets under the xperia label. they're ok, but nothing fantastic. like for like, htc and samsung handsets are better specd.

[lukey]

it's reassuring that it is indeed not just me that's noticed this. there was a pretty interesting article on the register about this today too.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/05/sony_hirai/

sony do make mobiles phones btw, there is one which i think can play old PS1 games (which in theory, if it's got decent controls should be a winner and what they should have focused on rather than the ill conceived vita) and a bunch of other handsets under the xperia label. they're ok, but nothing fantastic. like for like, htc and samsung handsets are better specd.

My supervisor got an Xperia Play (apparently they were going cheap because no-one bought them). In theory it should be ace, but as is often the case with Sony, the services end (ie. being able to actually buy games) was a bit of a disaster, and the controls didn't seem to hold up well for most games.

Actually, for a few years before consumer smartphones, Sony Ericsson phones were brilliant. They were unusual for having semi-decent cameras (for the time) with proper flashes and decent build quality. They were a bit of a victim of the Android fragmentation explosion, where the likes of HTC could pop out a handset every week to cover every conceivable corner of the market, whereas SE had little to innovate with. Insisting on peddling the Walkman brand for so long at a premium (maybe even still?) didn't help.

[Sput]

I have a lovely Sony Blu-Ray player that also does media streaming, iPlayer and YouTube. Being Sony, though, a set of higher-numbered models (suggesting better) released after it don't have some of these features. It makes it very hard to recommend one of their products without masses of research. It all smacks of a company desperate to upsell to the PS3, which is the only reason I can fathom that they've left 4od off their blu-ray players and kept it confined to the console.

Not that I'm bitter about it, you understand. It also flashes SEE YOU for FAR too long when you turn it off.

[Ant]

I loved my Sony Ericsson K800i, and so did a lot of people at one point (maybe around 2006-2008). It seemed to be a pretty popular device before iPhones and Blackberry's reached the mainstream market. It looked great and had a pretty decent camera if I recall, very decently priced too.

It's a shame they didn't go down the HTC route and create a decent challenge for Apple (they had the well-known Sony Ericsson brand to do it), but I don't think the Xperia has done as well as they'd hoped.