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1. Comment - Stringer: Apple's Jobs is "Greedy"

   (Jul 23, 2007 - 6:40 AM)

   Stringer is not the first senior Sony guy who has badmouthed Apple. Prior to Stringer's ascendence into the Sony #1 slot, another key Sony guy, D Komiyama, publicly made less volatile, but similarly-toned comments. Something like (while viewing Apple's initial success in the iPod business) "Yeah, the iPod is good for Apple right now, but they're just a one-trick pony."
   
   At the same time, other than their now universal and extreme "screw you and get out of my way" attitude, the Apple deference towards Sony has usually been been one of great respect.
   
   When Sony founder, Akio Morita, died in 1999, Steve spent about 5 minutes at an Apple employee meeting at Flint Center explaining why this man was great, and why he should be mourned by all.
   
   Sony's OEM relationship with Apple dates way back to the first Macs when Sony's 3.5" floppy drive, complete with Steve's favorite "auto-suck" disc insert feature, introduced the world to this new media.
   
   When Apple introduced the first desktop Mac II's, it was Sony's monochrome and later color monitors that made Apple's OEM (but made by Sony) products stand out.
   
   Later when Apple determined, after producing the groundbreaking but gigantic Mac Portable, that they really didn't understand how to make things tiny, it was a joint venture between Apple and Sony that produced what is often regarded as one of the pivotal products of the era, the Powerbook 100, Apple's first notebook. With the Mac Plus-based internal hardware design from Apple, and the manufacturing supplied by Sony factories in San Diego and Nagano, the PB100 was a technical, if not commercial success.
   
   Curiously, as it turns out, while Sony knew how to make tiny things, they knew little about how to simultaneously produce computers localized in 12 languages on a single continuous line, a feat that Apple had mastered. In fact, Sony had failed twice in this localization effort in the past before Sony's PB100 "A-Project." It is perhaps not concidental that the then-leader of Sony's A-Project, Bob Ishida, later became the President of Sony's Vaio business. In this
   third attempt at the global computer market, Sony finally understood how to localize.
   
   No question that Sony over the years has often attempted to insert control in a market where it has sought domination of the technology and IP as reasonable, perhaps sometimes unreasonable, payback on R&D investments.
   
   For decades, Sony had successfully set some of the key agendas in the consumer electronics industry.
   
   Sony's response that Apple isn't playing fair suggests that he's very uncomfortable with Apple now taking this lead role, not just in computers, where Sony has always been at the mercy of Bill Gates, but in gadgets and consumer hardware, a market that Sony invented and once owned.
   
   Sony is paying the price of HW innovation without vision, a business now run by bean-counters, determined to milk every penny of amortization out of fading developments (like Mini Disk for example), and a nearly total lack of software vision.
   
   And the world is now dancing to the tune of Apple's arrogant, but well-studied, and expertly strategized vision.
   
   Sorry Howard. Most humbly sorry.