Here's something I've been thinking about for some time now, and I'm sure some people at Sony have thought the same thing, correct or not.
In the late 90s Sony pretty much owned portable music. There were a lot of cheap competitors, but their medium and high end Walkman lines were THE SHIT. People get really excited about the build quality of the iPhone 4 and 5, and they should, its probably the single nicest thing most of those people own (unless they also collect Rolex watches, Rolls Royce cars, Transrotor turntables, etc) but before Apple stuff was that nice, before...probably the iPod Mini is where it started, Sony totally owned that shit. Their high end Discmans were incredible, and their portable MD units were even nicer. The MZ-E45, the MZ-E10...dang that shit was nice. Recently iOS6 borked the sound on my iPhone 4 so I've had to result to using my MZ-R90 portable MD recorder. I hadn't powered it up in at least a year, and dang, I fell in love all over again. Its so...cool. Its just a cool piece of gear, period.
Check out the Sony Qualia-017:
Machined from a solid brass billet and nickel plated. So dang nice. I’ve known several industrial designers who went to school in the 90s and I’m telling you, Sony was considered Shangri La of places to work at just out of college. Now...dang, while I was a big Sony fan from the Walkman 2 to the D-25 to the MZ-N10...but now...I can hardly remember what any of their non-Playstation products from the last decade even look like. They are basically nothing.
The problem was that while Sony pretty much owned the portable music market in Asia and Europe (with American's only slightly digging the format in the big cities while most preferred $40 POS CD players and 64MB Diamond Rio MP3 players) the annoying aspects of Sony ownership were really nagging people. Because of this, as soon as the iPod got as small and cheap as MD, everyone jumped ship.
The annoying aspects of Sony ownership:
Needing a different AC adaptor for virtually every unit purchased: Much ado has been made of Apple ditching the Dock connector they've had since about 9 years ago. I've got mixed feelings about that but Sony changed the AC adaptor EVERY f*ckING TIME they made something, even if the battery was the same. Total bullshit. They'd change the size of the plug, or the polarity, or the voltages went up or down .3 volts, something. Total bullshit.
Reliability: Sony's of the 80s were pretty tough. Sony's of the 90s...not so much. The ultra slick looking stuff was usually even less durable.
Proprietary this and that: my girlfriend had a Discman with a unique headphone jack. Yes, a proprietary version of something that's been standard for decades on every Walkman or Walkman-like device. Considering the quality of Sony headphones (terrible) this was unforgivable.
Stupid firewalls: this...this is the big one.
Because Sony owned a record label, they got really protective of copying things. This is going to be an issue with something like MD since virtually nobody ever bought retail pre-recorded MDs.
First, there was Serial Copyright Management. This meant that anything recorded from a digital source set a flag preventing the copy from ever being recorded digitally.
Then when NetMD was introduced, which allowed for USB transfer of music from a computer to an MD recorder, they required that you use their software (which was SHIT) and it couldn’t upload meaning that if you recorded something in the field it had to be recored onto your computer in another way (either analog, or via a home MD deck with digital out). NetMD could only make USB copies from the computer to the MD recorder. It still recorded shit in real time (unless you used the horrible MDLP formats) and still transcoded it to ATRAC format.
By the time time HiMD came out they fixed basically all of this. HiMDs held 1GB! They could play ATRAC, MP3, or even PCM meaning that you could put uncompressed CD quality sound on them! They were high speed! You could upload or download unrestricted as well as still record from PCM and analog sources (something that still kind of sucks ass on Apple stuff). You could even store shit on there that wasn’t even music! But...by then it was too late. Apple had taken almost all of their business from them.
Now, lets say, if their own short sited greed hadn’t killed MD and ended up giving basically their entire market to Apple (who at the time just made iPods and niche computers), where would things be?
And what if the PSP used HiMD, like it damned well should of?
Well, obviously everything would be solid state by now in 2012. Sony wouldn’t be using MDs anymore just as Apple no longer puts tiny hard drives in their iPods. But what if Sony had managed to keep that margin?
One of the reason’s Apple’s phones have become nicer and nicer over the years is because they have so much market share. The processes they use to make the stuff are not cheap. The only reason they can do it is because they sell so many f*cking units. If they were only moving as many phones as Sony is there is no way they’d be able to profit from phones that are literally made one at a time on huge banks of rapid prototyping machines as the iPhone 4 was. This is kind of a vicious circle, unfortunately. The less you sell the larger your margins need to be so you cheapen the phone leading to it being less popular and then less people buying it and on and on. Recently a co-worker of mine bought whatever the new Samsung is and was showing me its features. Its pretty powerful for sure! It can actually run video in a window while you do something else, which my iPhone sure as hell can’t do. The case though...jeez...we measured it and it was as thick as my iPhone 4 to within .1mm, plus is has beveled edges and a removable battery cover which basically...leads to it feeling like a cheap creaky POS by comparison. Compared to the iPhone 4 its like the difference between chocolate and shit (they look the same from a a distance, but one you get them close to your face its pretty easy to tell the difference).
But what if Sony hadn’t shot themselves right in the f*cking foot? What if MD lived on as HiUMD, a format common to the PSP (which still lives, keep in mind, even with the least Universal disc format ever) and Walkman? Apple might not even have half the portable music market instead of %90. Sony phones would be solid metal masterpieces and the PSP...well, the PSP would probably still be cheap-ish but better, and the Vita would be a solid state solid brass pinnacle of industrial design.
The iPad and the million clones of the iPad probably wouldn’t even exist since it was birthed from an irrational love of iOS. With Sony owning half the market people would be too interested in actual product diversity to lust after what is essentially just a giant-ass iPod Touch.
They really really f*cked up.
