Monday, June 17
The Moment Sony Returned To Relevance
Sony Electronics has not been a happy bunny the last few years. Though they've produced some fine products, they haven't been the trend-setter and status symbol they once were.
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Sony Electronics has not been a happy bunny the last few years. Though they've produced some fine products, they haven't been the trend-setter and status symbol they once were.
At E3 this year, in one shining moment, they turned around all those problems and made themselves relevant again. Not just relevant, but hugely important:
Note that all he really said was: We are not going to screw you over any more than we already do. And the response was just short of a standing ovation.
For those not following the story, Microsoft recently launched the third model of the Xbox, the Xbox One.* It requires an internet connection, and phones home once a day, and deactivates itself if it can't connect. All your games are attached to your account, so you can't simply lend the disk to a friend or sell it; you have to go to a registered second-hand game dealer and have the game de-registered from your account and registered to theirs - and that's if the developer has decided to allow that at all. Oh, and Kinect, the motion-sensor-camera-recorder-thingy, is now a core part of the system and must be connected and on to use the system. Though in theory you can deactivate some of its functions.
And to rub salt into the wound, the PS4 is 50% faster** and $100 cheaper. The difference in price is largely made up by the Kinect hardware; the Sony equivalent adds $60 to the price of the PS4. But the Sony one you can unplug.
I'll leave it to the gentle reader to discover the allegorical implications in this little tale.
Oh, and Sony? If you ship the Xperia Z Ultra as something like the rumours (1080p 6.44" screen, Snapdragon 800, 2GB RAM, 64GB flash, microSD, and a stylus), I'll likely buy two. You just nailed my wishlist.
* Yeah.
** Mileage may vary, but the PS4 and Xbox One have the exact same AMD graphics engine, except that the PS4 has 50% more cores - 1152 vs. 768.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
02:32 AM
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1
All this is purely marketing. Sony was sliding in Microsoft's direction for a while, with things like PSP Go. It's fairly obvious that digital distribution is the way to go. All Microsoft have to do is to correct their "phone home" silliness and voila, they are a generation ahead.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Monday, June 17 2013 03:24 AM (RqRa5)
2
Yep, it's pure marketing, but it's brilliant marketing. It's a classic example of never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake. All Sony needed to do was sit back while Microsoft told their customers to go fuck themselves, and then not do that.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, June 17 2013 01:32 PM (PiXy!)
3
But the point is, they are alrady doing "that". They only pretend they are somewhat different, for propaganda purposes.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Tuesday, June 18 2013 02:37 AM (RqRa5)
4
They are not doing that to prospective PS4 owners. Yet, anyway; tomorrow is another fish. And that's all that they needed. It's a low hurdle to jump, but the only other runner in the race decided to cut their own legs off.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, June 18 2013 09:01 AM (PiXy!)
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