I used to be an audiovisual consultant. A good friend of mine used to be in advertising (she's since gone client-side). She called me up once and said "I have a question for you but I can't name names. I've got a client with kind of... a... BAD reputation amongst taste-makers. They make a whole bunch of things, but one of them is consumer electronics. And I'm wondering if you could tell me a few things that you see consumer electronics manufacturers screw up that hurts their - "

"Is it Sony?" I asked.

"... let me call you after work," she said.

So we talked that evening and yeah, it was Sony. Her mission, should she choose to accept it, was to rehabilitate Sony Consumer Electronics to the point where they wouldn't be hated by anyone and everyone. And so I wrote her a 2000-word essay on everything that Sony had fucked up in the past ten years. It's long gone, of course, but oh my fucking god was it a cathartic thing to write.

Sony, of course, didn't do a single thing she suggested. She left that firm for another, and then another, and then another and it's so far back now that I can put stuff like this on the Internet.

My favorite textbook example of Sony's flailings isn't the rootkit. It isn't the $1100 PS3 being sold for $500 for marketshare. It's the NW-HD1: http://www.engadget.com/2004/07/01/is-sonys-nw-hd1-really-an...

Here's a company that owns a "kleenex" - the Walkman. They've got a player. It has twice the hard drive of the iPod. It has an OLED screen. It costs less than an iPod. It has three times the battery life.

And it won't even fucking play MP3s.

That's right - Sony came out with an iPod killer, and it only played ATRAC3, the shitty version of the ATRAC codec that only gets used on Minidiscs, and everybody hates, and if you want to put your existing MP3 library on your new Sony Walkman, you had to run the files individually through SoundStage, their shitty-ass Windows-only bugfest that transcodes one shite format to another and then pretends it sounds good. It surprised no one when it sold like Anthrax lollypops, despite a cripplingly-expensive media campaign.

That's Sony in a nutshell: "Have a great idea, then fuck it up so unimaginably that everyone else just stares in awe." Bonus points if you can shove a Memory Stick up its ass.