Specineff wrote:While Sony says " Thou shalt not have any other formats beside me. ATRAC is what you'll listen, breath and serve all your life. 132 Kpbs with artifacts transferred at sometimes painful speed is what you'll have as long as you serve me. And should I see one single digit changed in your MD, all your music shall be voided, for ever more. I am ATRAC, Thee lord and master."
No, I mean it. Get one of those Net MDs and see for yourself. I am sure this is the same kind of crap that Sony will pull off with the PSP when it comes to downloadable content.
I don't know what Sony have done/are doing regarding MP3 playback on the PSP, I think I read somewhere you could just drag and drop MP3s to it, but I don't know. But there is now native MP3 support on all new model portable music players (ie no forced conversion to ATRAC). I heard there may be firmware updates for old players doing the same thing, but I don't know for sure.
They got it wrong, sure. But now they have fixed that problem, and fixed it while the market is still relatively small. They haven't lost yet by a long shot. Maybe they will in the end, maybe they won't. But it's by no means decided yet, it's early days still. The failure of MD was nothing to do with this though. It was more to do with the fact people had upgraded all their music collections from tape & vinyl to CD and weren't about to do it all over again for MD. This was also in the earlier days of the net, when fewer people were interested in downloading tracks and putting them on a player. By the time people were interested, flash card players and hard disk players had arrived.
As for the UMD films, yeah, I tend to agree that they may well not be a big thing, except for people who travel a lot. Perhaps if it could be connected to a TV to playback on a big screen? I don't know if this is the case. Suppose it also depends on the price. Then there's the competition from Blu Ray and HD DVD as well. Probably just stuck movie playback on so people couldn't complain "it's nice, but they could have had movie playback..."
zimeon:
I see what you're getting at there. I don't agree, but perhaps that's because I'm the sort of person that would make claims like that Sony guy made, if I was put in his position. If you don't have confidence in yourself/your company/your product, who else is going to have confidence in it? Sometimes you'll end up looking stupid. But sometimes you'll end up saying "hey, look, I was right!"
Regarding the advert, I haven't seen the one you are talking about. Was it a Japanese advert? The ones that have been shown in the UK (and I presume the rest of Europe) are completely different style to how that sounds, some of them really are quite good. Without having seen it, I can only guess, but I'd have thought an advert claiming the PS2 will make your family happy, give you a beautiful wife and healthy children etc would have its tongue firmly in cheek
Personally, though, I reserve my disrespect for the people who do things like buy something they don't want or need just because its cool, rather than the companies which willingly accept their money for doing so. If you're that weak minded, you deserve to lose your money, IMO.
In general, I can't really be bothered to argue this stuff anymore. It's my opinion that Sony are no better or worse than their rivals. I think Kutaragi's comments were certainly arrogant, but I don't get angry at them, I find them rather amusing. I like seeing people running these massive businesses actually have some personality, and being willing to say stupid shit like that. Probably, as I said to zimeon, because I'd do the same in their position
Kutaragi hasn't quite yet caught up to Yamauchi in my favourite arrogant businessman charts yet though.