[Sussex] Sony at the CES, etc..

[Geoff Teale]

Morning all,

I don't know if anyone has been following the developments following the
keynote speech by the COO of Sony at the Consumer Entertainment Show in the
USA last week.  If you haven't here's how things look as of today:

- Sony have abandoned their internal OS development, Apieros (???), which
has so far featured only in the Aibo.

- Sony is forming syndicate with the ten largest technology companies in
Japan (excluding Toshiba - don't know why..) to develop an "open platform
for connected devices", "built on the Linux Operating System". 

- Sony will unify it's entire product range on this single platform - that's
everything from phones, MP3 players and Cameras via PDA's and Playstations
all the way up to laptops and desktop computers.

- Other manufacturers are invited to participate - Sony feels the key to
future success is to sell hardware competing on quality and price competing
for a common, open platform with open standards and to sell content to be
delivered via that platform.

Any thoughts?  In part I think this is fueled by the board of Sony having
developed an utter hatred of Microsoft (Sony is afterall the company that is
in the midst of a 5 year program to remove Microsoft products completely
from it's internal systems and desktops following a falling out between the
CEO of Sony and Billy G).  The other factor (Apart from some obvious
commercial nouse in the Sony corporation) seems to be Sony very conciously
looking to move away from licensing other people's technology (they have
been very anti MP3 for portable digital devices - they prefered to use their
own (inferior) inhouse technology rather than license MP3 from Thomson.
Given Thomson change in attitude concerning Mp3 as a revenue source this may
well have been the wisest decision anyone in that sector made (see that
people like Red Hat are now deliberately excluding MP3 from their distros -
favouring Ogg instead, if your using these technologies for legal "fair use"
this shoudn't make any difference to you).

-- 
geoff.teale at claybrook.co.uk
tealeg at member.fsf.org

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