Sony launched an online music store two years ago, and if that's news to you, you're probably not alone. In the two years since Sony hired Sheryl Crow to announce its online music store on a jet at
30,000 feet (I know, I don't recall hearing about this either), Sony Connect has cornered less than 3 percent of the digital music market. Phil Wiser, the Sony executive in charge of this massive
failure to launch, is now expected to leave Sony Connect at the end of the week--but this could be a good thing. As everybody knows, once upon a time it was Sony's Walkman that dominated portable
music, but nowadays you'd be forgiven for thinking Sony has left the portable music biz altogether in the wake of Apple Computer's dominance of digital music. According to a
Los Angeles Times
report, the kiss of death for Sony Connect had been its pairing with an obsolete media format--Sony's MiniDisc, which never caught on with American consumers. Couple that with its proprietary music
format and anti-piracy software, and you can begin to see how it never caught on. One analyst called Sony a hardware company that "doesn't completely understand" software. "It's
completely not in their DNA to build products for this digitally connected era," he said. Meanwhile, Sony's failure in this arena wasn't the departing CEO's fault. "Phil was making all the
right recommendations," said one analyst, "but they were falling on deaf ears." Let's hope Sony gets a few takeaways from this prior to its PlayStation 3 launch this fall.
Read the whole story at Los Angeles Times »
