Stringer Sonies Up Between A Rock And A Hard Place

It'll be interesting to see what Howard Stringer does as he takes the helm at Sony. He has acknowledged that the company's five year slide was due to the fact that the content and product development sides could not agree on protection levels. Duh. We're at a standstill. All the new improvements people want in hardware have to do with controlling when, where and what they consume: customizing their content, exercising their fair use rights to duplicate and share the entertainment, avoiding commercials they have no interest in seeing, etc., etc.

The content providers, rather than trying to find ways to direct and customize the advertising so that people actually will value it and respond to it, use their $600M Spiderman legs to strangle the mothership, and offer them less and less while charging more and more. I'm not optimistic. What happened is that the US based entertainment dollars won out over the increasingly commodity oriented hardware industry. It's almost like sacrificing the weaker child for the stronger... after crippling the once robust child.

This guy appointed Andy Lack and is no friend of free culture. It looks like things are going to get worse before they get better. While electronics still accounts for 70% of Sony's business, that will now shift to the cash cow content scam. Why play on a level field when you can go to a government subsidized hill from which you can roll boulders over your customers? Why innovate and progress when we can just keep milking the same cash cow?