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Posted by tony on 11/18/05 11:37
the spyware secretly included may have only affected the small
percentage of the 2.1 million US buyers of the infected discs who
played them on their computers but the news of it has horrified many
millions more worldwide. They are also gaining an icreasingly bad
reputation for shoddy goods in both hifi and pc products accompanied
by a very arrogant response to consumer complaints. This may be the
worst aspect of the current story but also check out their attitude to
VAIO motherboard faults.
We are about to move into the HD generation of consumer goods and
software alongside the merging of TV and PC products in the living
room. The debate over HDVD or BlueRay has never really been about
storage capacity or cost per disc, there was a similar one before the
launch of DVD but the studios are too smart to have two rival formats.
The real issue is copy protection and Sony seemed to be gaining ground
with their system. Their system suits the studios but consumers will
soon see that Blue Ray players will require an internet connection to
phone home, and remember that Sony have just lied about what
information is sent. Are they likely to buy products that report all
the TV shows they watch, discs they play, websites they visit, emails
they send etc ? Will pc owners want a blue ray burner for the same
reasons ?
Sony would appear to heading into the next big consumer spending spree
with a reputation for expensive, shoddy and infected goods with an
arrogant customer relations team, Microsoft gets away with it because
it has no effective competition but that isn't true for Sony.
They took on the studios over Betamax and later DAT, both allowing
owners to make copies but it has changed a lot since it became a
studio with a back catalogue. Perhaps they are ready to lose out as a
manufacturer and make their money from owning the software and the
media it is distributed on. This is fine for them but they got heavy
too early with this one.
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