Sony kills puppies

Within the last year, I've gone from an indifferent opinion of Sony to absolute hatred of everything they stand for. Their "you can't do that" stance toward PSP hacks, incredibly selfish business tactics with Blu-Ray, and DRM laden consumer electronics have given me a good look at what they're all about. Sony isn't interested in what anybody else wants, they only seem to want to look out for themselves.

I don't know that the internals of the company look like, but I think it's probably a safe bet that the engineers have been on the right track all the time. The trouble is that the management sees an opportunity to make a bit more money and end up killing the product in the process.

These problems aren't just isolated to Sony Electronics either; I recently learned that the Sony music label killed a very successful band that I quite enjoyed. Nine Days was popular when I was in middle school and I've spent the better part of my musical life listening to their sole album. According to Wikipedia, they did record another album but for whatever reason, Sony didn't release it and the supposed bootlegs seem to have gone missing from the internet.

Sony's Playstation division has become nothing more than a marketing machine. When Microsoft decided to play dirty and release the specs of the Xbox 360 a week before E3 2005, the Playstation marketing team took every number on the page, multiplied it by two, added some propaganda about a Cell processor and pushed out a press release. A year later, I have an Xbox 360 sitting in the living room and Sony's engineers are still trying to clean up the mess that the marketing department left for them.

On the Blu-Ray front, the competition (HD-DVD) is also far ahead with better picture quality, legal ripping, and media center integration all on the way with Windows Vista. Sony has fallen way behind with substantially fewer available movie titles on the shelf and a very small number of actual Blu-Ray devices in production, none of which are Sony branded. It is also rumored that Sony wrote a clause into their contracts with device manufacturers that no dual format players will be allowed. Why would you kill the interoperability that companies like Samsung and HP already have working prototypes of?

In short, I believe that there is only one reason Sony's executives would allow these atrocities to happen inside their own company: They kill puppies. As a consumer, I am not going to support their hobbies any longer. The puppies must live!

# Sony kills puppies

Within the last year, I've gone from an indifferent opinion of Sony to absolute hatred of everything they stand for. Their "you can't do that" stance toward PSP hacks, incredibly selfish business tactics with
Blu-Ray, and DRM laden consumer electronics have given me a good look at what they're all about. Sony isn't interested in what anybody else wants, they only seem to want to look out for themselves.

These problems aren't just isolated to Sony Electronics either; I recently learned that the Sony music label killed a very successful band that I quite enjoyed. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Days">Nine Days</a> was popular when I was in middle school and I've spent the better part of my musical life listening to their sole album. According to Wikipedia, they did record another album but for whatever reason, Sony didn't release it and the supposed bootlegs seem to have gone missing from the internet.

On the Blu-Ray front, the competition (HD-DVD) is also far ahead with better picture quality, legal ripping, and media center integration all on the way with Windows Vista. Sony has fallen way behind with substantially fewer available movie titles on the shelf and a very small number of actual Blu-Ray devices in
production, none of which are Sony branded. It is also rumored that Sony wrote a clause into their contracts with device manufacturers that no dual format players will be allowed. Why would you kill the interoperability that companies like Samsung and HP already have working prototypes of?