Sony Over Promises and Under Delivers again

Pretty harsh statment huh?  Well let me say this, i used to love Sony products.  i used to have walkmans, phones, clocks, receivers, cd players, and their Trinitron CRT's were tops.  i always bought Trinitron computer monitors and TV's.   However today i don't really give them much of a second look.  Part of the reason why is their promotion efforts and ways of selling content are getting in the way of their hardware.  i base this on my last 3 experiences with Sony.

The first and most recent is the isawthat promotion.  i clicked through the commercial that was on my Tivo until i saw the frames with the message posing a tantalizing question and the link to their promotion.  Once there, you are encouraged to watch the features and be rewarded.  What do you get out of doing all this work?  The opportunity to download a couple of crappy screensavers, a Shaolin monkey picture, and a stupid little page on how to give your boyfriend a heart transplant.

My second experience is the long-running Sony Rewards promotion.  Here you sign up to receive emails from Sony and if you clicked through the emails and the ads promoting new products, movies, music, etc., you would collect points towards the purchase of Sony products.  This idea is good, but as with the isawthat campaign, the reward is hardly worth the effort.  The first problem is the starting prices are pretty much set at suggested retail.  The second problem is the accumulation of points had no real material impact on reducing the price.  In other words, you would have had to click through tons of ads, games, and quizes to get enough points to actually have a chance at getting a product down to it's actual retail price.

Lastly is the Sony Connect (SonicStage) music download service that uses yet another proprietary format for DRM.  To be honest, i only used this when i got some coupons either by eating McDonald's or Cheerios or something to that effect.  And to be fair, they have a decent selection of stuff.  Not nearly as good as iTunes or Napster (both with their own non-compatible DRM schemes).  In any case, it's another bloated piece software holding a fragment of my music collection that i would rather not deal with.

So there, that's my experience with Sony over the last few years.  Couple that with the bad press they get regarding their copy protection schemes on compact disks (felt tip marker hack, root kit episode) and even on Blu-Ray and i hope you get a sense of why Sony has become irrelevant to satisfying my personal technological wants.

Posted at 06:04PM Mar 02, 2007 by Robert Eister in Reviews/Opinions  |  Comments[0]