[Sussex] Sony at the CES, etc..

[Mark Harrison]

Geoff,

It's actually the next big battle for consumer dollars...

In the red corner, Sony with Playstation 2.
In the blue corner, Microsoft with XBox.

M.

-----Original Message-----
From: Geoff Teale [mailto:Geoff.Teale at claybrook.co.uk] 
Sent: 22 January 2003 08:54
To: Sussex (E-mail)
Subject: [Sussex] Sony at the CES, etc..


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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