Sony CEO Howard Stringer On Music, Apple

May 24th, 2009 by Sohrab Osati

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Recently, Sony’s Sir Howard Stringer sat down with Nikkei Electronics Asia and pledged that Sony would adopt more open standard policy in the future and said, “If we had gone with open technology from the start, I think we probably would have beaten Apple” in the music market. Its been noted that Apple is never new to any market, like the iPod or the iPhone but that they evaluate the market and come in with something simple and elegant. Sony was the king of music players with the Walkman which used the open format of Tapes and even with CD Players, Sony would use, a CD and they were still king. But when the MP3 era began, Sony would make its own specific plays with Mini Disc Players and ATRAC format for their players, which was used with Sony’s Connect Player and SonicStage. The reason neither scenario worked for Sony was that although Mini Disc Players were great and to this day, hold their own, it was something that Sony made and nobody else offered and so this left it to Sony to battle every other brand and format. That’s where ATRAC comes in. Higher quality then MP3 yet more compressed but again, Sony kept the format to themselves and everybody began to adopt MP3 while Sony pushed hard for ATRAC. The train was already missed. Another failed reason for Sony’s Strategy is Sony’s Connect Player. While Apple pushed iTunes with every publisher and now has grown the service to work with the AppleTV, iPhone, to rent and buy movies, Sony couldn’t even always get their own artist (we must remember, Sony Pictures and Sony BMG are large media companies). So as Apple pushed their digital service, Sony kept the service very locked and the selection wasn’t there.

Sir Howard Stringer went on to say, “We can no longer say that we’re right and our customers are wrong. We can’t build only what we want to build.” We hope, that this is new blood being pumped into Sony with a new direction. Mr. Stringer has noted many times that by 2011, Sony hopes to have 80% of its services connected to the web and we hope with this, it means connecting their products to one universal service.  More on this vision to come.