Sony Sucks

“Pity poor Ken Kuturagi. The creative genius behind Sony’s videogame consoles — the PlayStations 1, 2 and 3 — announced Thursday that he would step down as CEO of the company’s games division, which means his career there will end on a sour note, the sound of defeat.”

“Decades from now, PS3 vs. Wii will be remembered as a cautionary business tale: how pride, politics, and an overabundance of technology can blind you to the simple truth of what consumers want.”

Source: CNN Money.com

“Whenever I ask Sony’s PR folks for an evaluation loaner, the answer is inevitably “We only have a few units. I’ll put you on the list for one of them.” Except for the T350P, I’ve never seen a review unit: not for the UX180P or the UX280P or even the tiny Sony Mylo Internet communications device not mentioned above.”

“Clearly a company of Sony’s size could find the bucks somewhere in its deep pockets to make maybe 5 or 10 or even 1,000 review units available to product evaluators. This makes me wonder what Sony is so afraid of.”

“I don’t think the issue is money. It’s a desire to shroud new products in a fog of mystery, a fear of honest reviews and a certain disdain for most of the product evaluation press. That’s all too bad.”

Source: THG>DenGuru> What’s Sony Afraid Of?

When played on the PS3, your PS1 and PS2 games will actually look DRAMATICALLY WORSE than on their original systems. Watch the video for a comparison.

The PS3 resizes the graphic output of PS1/PS2 games at a low resolution with no filtering, causing artifacts and amplifying jagged edges.

…take a look at what Microsoft big boss Bill Gates had to say about HD-DVD in an interview with engadget.com:

Way of the dodo…

“In terms of movies, I often say that this is the last format battle there will ever be [hd-dvd and blu-ray], because everything is going to go online — you’re going to download it. In fact, one of my favorite features on Xbox Live is where you can go and get the HD demos of the games or get HD videos like the making of the Xbox, the making of Titanic, they’ve got this Mission Impossible 3 thing.”

The HD-DVD Drive Goes the Way of Sega’s 32X

“In 2004, Sony launched an e-book reader in Japan that also failed to take off. Called the Librie, it won plaudits for design, but its high price and draconian antipiracy technology — users could only “rent” books from Sony for 60 days before the tomes deleted themselves — scared off consumers.”   - BusinessWeek

Really?  I’m shocked!  Sony created a decent product and then hamstrung it with unbelieveably shortsighted and stupid DRM?  That never happens!

Apparently there is no grassroots outpouring of love for Sony’s PSP.  People don’t like it and don’t make fan websites so Sony took matters into its own hands and went back to their old standby - fake-ass reviews, remember David Manning, well now we have a fake PSP fan site.

Read all about it at the Inquirer.

Here’s a parody of Sony’s appalling (and now defunct) fake fansite, www.alliwantforxmasisapsp.com:

Sony was the number #1 technology disappointment of the year according to Tom’s Hardware Guide:

Sony had a real bad year, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that the company appears in this ranking in one way or another. In fact, there was so much wrong with Sony products this year that we chose to list the company instead of a single product.

Sony tops the THG list for biggest disappointment of 2006

200,000 consoles for the entire US market?  Wow, this launch just couldn’t have gone any better … for MICROSOFT and NINTENDO!  The console is late, not shipping in volume and not ready for market.

Ars Technica found some problems

NY Times panned it

Even Time magazine wrote “Sony’s Playstation 3 is Not Worth the Hype”

Here are the latest sales figures:

On Dec 25th they were: Xbox360 : 9M, Wii : 2M, PS3: 0.75M.

Sony Pictures’ performance is less than amazing.  In the top 8 grossing distributors, although Sony is ranked third, it makes the LOWEST average gross per film with a sad $35.8M per film on average whereas the best performer, DreamWorks SKG manages to pull in a whopping $62.9M or 75% more!

Source: The Numbers

Sony puts out a lot of second rate films and isn’t terribly good at making highly profitable movies, merely good at making lots of movies.

Looking at the “Most Profitable Movies” and “Biggest Money Losers” of all time we see that Sony ranks 2nd and 4th in one the lists, but doesn’t appear in the other.  Can you guess which Sony figured more prominently in?  The winner’s list or the loser’s list?

I guess Sony doesn’t know that the movie business is about blockbusters.  No wonder they are desperate to promote DRM in their electronics business - they need to squeeze every cent out of these underperforming movies and need all the DRM help they can get.

Perhaps Sony marketing execs should write fake reviews to help promote their lousy pictures … oh wait, they did!

“[Sony’s] best skill today is to take a gun, target its own foot, and shoot.”

“Sony has been in a steep decline as far as innovation and clear thinking are concerned for at least a decade.”

“Sony languishes while exhibiting an odd, inexplicable arrogance that cocoons everything it does and every decision it makes.”

Source: PC Magazine - John C. Dvorak