Here’s the story:

Ken Kutaragi, president of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc., said he and other Sony employees have been frustrated for years with management’s reluctance to introduce products like Apple Computer Inc.‘s iPod, mainly because the Tokyo company had music and movie units that were worried about content rights.

Erik

Interesting article. I would have love to have read more about it, too bad the article was so short. But it’s a start—hopefully we’ll see some kick-ass Sony MP3 players sometime soon…

Hmmm… Sony’s propietary ATRAC format and lack of MP3 support caused them to lose sales?  Who would have figured?

I have been saying it for years.  All this “protection” of content is costing them sales, has been all along.  Most people are honest and will pay for their movies and music.  You will NEVER stop the dishonest people.  All you do is waste millions of dollars on research to encrypt the content and make it more complicated to use.  And people still come up with ways to get around it, DVD is a perfect example of that.

[quote author=“AndyMac”]Hmmm… Sony’s propietary ATRAC format and lack of MP3 support caused them to lose sales?  Who would have figured?

I have been saying it for years.  All this “protection” of content is costing them sales, has been all along.  Most people are honest and will pay for their movies and music.  You will NEVER stop the dishonest people.  All you do is waste millions of dollars on research to encrypt the content and make it more complicated to use.  And people still come up with ways to get around it, DVD is a perfect example of that.

Amen.

wow, i’m surprised that they would admit that.

here’s another interesting article from cnn…

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/biztech/01/21/digital.rights.electronics.reut/index.html

No offense to Sony but its about time they admitted to this mistake.  I know I passed up a Sony MP3 player because it didn’t actually support native MP3s.  But I guess this appology means nothing until I see them releasing devices that support MP3s nativly (I know they have a few out now but I’m waiting for them to go mainstream with it).

Now if only Sony would talk about lack of Motion Eye support under Linux.

i’m still excited about the psp, hopefully coming out in march.

Actually if Sony would do something about lack of help on their hardware under Linux period I’d be happy.  Most everything for Sony hardware had to be written by reverse engineering the Windows drivers (i think thats how sonypi came about).  But I don’t see Sony doing anything like this since they sell Windows only machines.