/ 5 September 2010

Apple drives another nail into sluggish Sony’s coffin

I remember a time when Sony dominated the gadgetry business, when it was a synonym for elegant design and advanced functionality.

You have to feel sorry for Sony sometimes. I mean to say, there it was on Wednesday in Berlin, at the IFA consumer electronics show, launching a new music and video download service called Qriocity (it’s like “curiosity”, only it couldn’t get the domain name, I suppose) — and what happens? Steve Jobs goes on stage in San Francisco and announces that Apple is having another go at the TV download business.

And guess who gets all the media coverage?

How are the mighty fallen. I remember a time when Sony dominated the gadgetry business, when it was a synonym for elegant design and advanced functionality, when Walkmans ruled the world. It had shops in upmarket malls where young males came to drool. And now? Ask a teenager about Sony and s/he will reply: “Aren’t they the outfit that makes flat-screen TVs and DVD players and other stuff for adults?” Analysing the reasons for Sony’s fall from grace would make for an interesting MBA thesis. My favoured candidates are a failure to understand software and missing the significance of the internet.

Whatever the explanation, however, the outcome was what we witnessed last week — massive coverage of Steve Jobs strutting his stuff in San Francisco, while over in Berlin poor old Fujio Nishida, president of Sony Europe, might as well have been flogging army-surplus radios in a Baghdad souk.

Which is a pity because the world needs a competitive market in multimedia downloads and, at the moment, Apple looks like scooping the pool. In his presentation, Jobs announced a new device that will deliver 99c rentals of TV shows over the net. This replaces the old Apple TV device, which was launched in 2007 and stored video purchased from the iTunes store for display on a domestic television set, but which never really caught on. “We’ve sold a lot of them,” said His Steveness, “but it’s never been a huge hit.” The device was, he said, “too complicated for average consumers”.

The sole fly in his ointment was that only two US networks have signed up to rent their shows via the new gizmo. One is Fox, a network whose doings passeth all understanding; the other is ABC, which is owned by Disney, of which Jobs is the largest single shareholder. But the other networks have stayed aloof, for the very good reason that turkeys eschew Christmas. They see the day coming when Apple will exert the kind of control over them that it now has over record companies. Jobs appeared unperturbed by such laggardly behaviour.

Onboard the iTunes bandwagon
“We think the rest of the studios will see the light and get onboard,” he said, loftily, before adding that Netflix, the video-rental company, has also climbed “onboard”. Henceforth, first-run HD movies will be available for rental for $4,99 on the same day as they are released on DVD.

Netflix executives are doubtless extolling this deal to their shareholders as a brilliant strategic move. But in fact they are being nice to the crocodile in the hope that it will eat them last.

If the new Apple service/device proves a hit, then the movie studios will indeed get onboard the iTunes bandwagon, in which case they will begin to wonder why they need Netflix as an intermediary.

But I digress. Since nothing interests the mainstream media as much as television, Jobs’s announcement of the new Apple TV device attracted most of the attention. In the process, another Apple initiative went under-reported — a new “feature” in the latest version of iTunes. It’s called Ping and is described as “a social network for music”. And it starts with 160-million members, the current number of iTunes users. The idea is that you can elect to “follow” — and be followed by — your friends, so that you know what music they’re playing and vice versa. And, quite by accident, there’s a “buy” button somewhere conveniently to hand.

“It’s like Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes,” said Jobs, which is a bit rich, not to say misleading. “As far as I can tell,” writes John Battelle, a well-known commentator on these things, “they in fact don’t ever meet. You can’t leverage your networks on Facebook and Twitter in Ping. It’s another closed Apple system, another Apple universe in a gilded gift box.”

Dave Winer, one of the elder statesmen of the web, signed up for Ping on launch day and found that he’d been assigned the username “scriptingnews”. “They didn’t give me a choice of name,” he writes. “That’s the name I chose when I got my first iPod or whatever got me logged into their store the first time. I never would have chosen to be scriptingnews on a social network. Not at all obvious how to change it, if I can.”

Welcome to Steve’s Walled Garden. We’ll all wind up there if we’re not careful. Wake up, Sony. – guardian.co.uk