News Sony Examines Digital Music Strategy

The Big S top brass laments that the CE glob-corp dropped the ball on MP3, and hopes that hard lessons have been learned and that it won't happen again. PCWorld has the story:

Sony has learned several lessons from its reluctance to quickly embrace music download services and is now working hard to make up ground against the dominance of competitors such as Apple Computer, a senior executive said on Thursday.

The Tokyo-based consumer electronics giant wasn't as quick off the mark as Apple, RealNetworks, and some others in offering a system for downloading music to digital players. When it did launch a service it stuck to a proprietary encoding system and offered no support in its players for the widely used MP3 format. The result has been a poor showing for Sony--traditionally one of the strongest names in portable audio--in the market for players based on flash memory and hard-disk drives.

"Because we had a music business, Sony was reluctant about introducing an IPod type of new product, but we (learned) many lessons," said Ken Kutaragi, executive deputy president of Sony, speaking at The Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan.

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