Sony's hooks up the Connect Company to take on Apple
It took Sony way too long to wake up and realize that Apple was kicking its ass—c'mon, it wasn't until this that they were even able to rollout an iPod competitor, and even then they
managed to totally bungle it—but they're determined to hit back hard next year and have created a new division called Connect Company which has one mission: challenging Apple's dominance of the online download and portable digital audio player markets. The division brings together
Sony's Connect online download service (which hasn't exactly been a raging success) with the team charged with developing and creating hard drive and flash memory-based digital audio players.
We'll spare everyone another round of "too little, too late", but if Sony is going to even start to make a dent in the iPod's dominance (yeah, adding native support for MP3s was a big start) they're going to have to hit Apple where they'll hurt: price, ease of use, and openness.
At this point, Sony, you can?t compete solely on design and features (like longer battery life); those alone aren?t enough to win people over, so you need to make both the players and the music download service cheaper, easier to use,
and less subject to all sorts of DRM nastiness and you might have a shot at grabbing some serious marketshare away from Apple. And while you?re at it, get creative and start thinking of the Connect store as a way to sell more MP3 players rather than the other way around, so don?t obsess over stopping piracy so much. You?ve got a record label, right? Give away 500 or a 1000 tracks from Sony Music artists with every purchase of a
Network Walkman. You might lose a little money that way, but you?ll win big points for giving people a way to fill up their players right off the bat. Or even do what Napster is doing with the all-you-can-download monthly subscription service they?re introducing and give people a year or six months of free unlimited music rentals when they buy a player. You?ll have to break down and use Microsoft?s DRM (or develop your own), but you?ll be able to offer people a way to fill up their player with music for free right out of the box.
The point is, you have to do something that?s more than just a pale imitation of what Apple is already doing. An internal reorganization to help avoid all the constant infighting that goes on between all the different little fiefdoms within Sony is a good first step, but there is still a loooooooong way to go.
[Via TUAW]