Sony In Talks To Buy Ericsson Out of Phone Venture 61
PolygamousRanchKid sends in this excerpt from a Reuters report:
"Sony Corp is in talks to buy out Ericsson's stake in their mobile phone joint venture, a source said, in a bid to catch up with rivals. The move could help Sony recoup ground in the battle against Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics, where it has been hampered by its disparate offerings of mobile gadgets and online content. The joint venture, formed in 2001, thrived after its breakthroughs with Walkman music phones and Cybershot cameraphones, both of which leveraged Sony's brands. But it lost out to bigger rivals Nokia and Samsung at the cheaper end of the market, and was late to react to Apple's entry into the high-end of the market. It has refocused its business to make smartphones using Google's Android platform, but has dropped to No. 9 in global cellphone rankings from No. 4 just a few years ago."
Re:Good for them (Score:5, Informative)
>>I lost all respect for Sony after Sony Entertainment Group pushed the hardware teams into implementing DRM. I don't buy Sony anymore, nor do I recommend it to friends and family.
What, it wasn't when they installed rootkits on your computers (that you wanted to listen to audio CDs on how dare you) or when they secretly added a "you can't sue us" clause to their PS3 EULA? Oh, and if you don't agree to the updated terms, you can't play any games online, use the internet browser, stream Netflix, or patch your single player games? Or when they decided to make every multiplayer game come with a code, meaning that used games will cost you an extra $10 to play online (paid to Sony) and that normal, non-used game buyers and sellers will be fucking annoyed by having to punch in a long code every time they buy a game?
The problem with boycotting Sony is that there's sooo many reasons to do so.
The new millenium hasn't been good to Sony (Score:2, Informative)
Sony has been completely out played by Apple on what really 10 years ago people would have thought was Sony's natural market.
In the 90's Sony was the premium portable music brand, built on the walkman and diversified through the discmans and introduction of the technology in the minidisc. They totally missed the boat on the introduction and portable harddisk and flash memory based media players. What is most ironic is they pretty much had developed the key technologies for the minidisc in the early 90's, mainly music file compression algorythms and hardware encoding and decoding in the music player. The only thing that was missing was to replace the magneto optical discs with a hard-drive. Instead other people did it and perfected it instead and Sony came late to the party.
Sony then started to fight back against the brand dominance of the Ipod, by pushing the walkman phone idea, where the flash media player is integrated into the phone. For the time they were good music player phones. And this is where Apple really excelled, they anticipated the shift away from separate ipod and phone to the combined item, and decided that their best strategy was to make their own phone, and managed to wipe the floor with Sony again.