Posted on 06/08/2006 3:06:44 AM PDT by RWR8189
THOSE WHO IGNORE HISTORY are doomed to repeat it. One of life's more satisfying ironies, however, is that the same fate often befalls those who fixate on history. Consider the coming train wreck of Sony's PlayStation 3.
At this year's annual Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, Sony announced that its next-generation video-game console will begin retailing in November for $599 (or $499 for a stripped-down version). The news rippled through the gaming industry, the consensus being that Sony had doomed its new system with such a high price tag. Traditionally, home video-game consoles have sold for $199 to $299.
This news was of broader interest than you might think. According to the New York Times, video-game sales in the United States topped $10.5 billion last year. Since Sony released its first PlayStation in September 1995, the company has dominated that market. According to the marketing-information firm NPD Group, Sony's PlayStation 2, which has sold more than 101 million units, owns 55 percent of the current market share in video games.
Over the years, Sony's video-game unit has become increasingly important to the corporation and helped the company through tough times. In the down year of 2002, for instance, PlayStation generated more than half of Sony's profit.
So why would Sony price itself out of such an important market?
The answer is: History. It looks like suicide to offer a $600 video game--unless you are Sony.
The reason for the elevated price is that PlayStation 3 includes Sony's high-definition "Blu-ray" DVD player. As a separate item, these players are not yet available to consumers, but when they arrive in stores this year, they will be priced from upward of $1,000 a pop. Sony owns the Blu-ray disc-reading technology and is girding itself for war against a competing high-definition DVD format, Toshiba's HD-DVD, which arrived on the market in April.
HD-DVD is a less robust medium, but it is both first and cheaper. An HD-DVD player can be had for less than half of what Blu-ray players will cost. With such a disadvantage, Sony is leveraging Blu-ray by tying it to the company's next video-game system. Sony knows a little something about format jousts.
As Edward Jay Epstein details in his book The Big Picture, the company we know as Sony was born in 1945, when Akiro Morita launched Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Co. He sold the type of household gadgets needed in a war-ravaged country: rice cookers and heating pads. Eventually Morita became interested in recording devices. His first major success came when he found a way to use cheap paper tape to record sound. Building his company on recordable tape, Morita internalized the idea of "format über alles."
But he didn't have an opportunity to pursue a new format for many years--not until 1975, when Sony introduced a videorecording device called Betamax.
Like Edsel or New Coke, the word Betamax is now synonymous in business-school classrooms around the country with "corporate failure." It was the first home videorecording system, and it was technologically superior to its competitor, VHS, which did not arrive on the consumer scene until two years later.
But Betamax was also more expensive than VHS. And while Sony tried to keep the fruits of the format to itself, VHS was farmed out to other electronics manufacturers. As John Nathan notes in his book Sony, by 1980, "Betamax was being driven from the home video market."
Over the years, Sony met with other format failures: the mini-disc in 1991 and the memory stick in 1998. Neither was as costly as the Betamax disaster, but both were born of the same mania for proprietary formats.
Sony internalized these losses, but viewed them as the results of tactical, not strategic, defects. So the company looked for ways to bolster new formats. As the DVD revolution was dawning in the late 1980s, Sony spent $3.4 billion to buy the movie studio Columbia-TriStar Pictures. Sony believed its hardware simply needed software to go with it.
Sony wisely avoided the fight for a proprietary DVD format, instead partnering with Toshiba and Philips (the DVD already had one competitor, DivX). But always mindful of the past, Sony looked to establish Blu-ray as the next-generation format, putting it on a collision course with HD-DVD. To gird itself for this war, the company bought another movie studio, MGM, in 2004 for $5 billion and then decided to put Blu-ray drives into the PlayStation 3.
It's a strange way of thinking. Obsessed with owning proprietary formats, Sony keeps picking fights. It keeps losing. And yet it keeps coming back for more, convinced that all it needs to do is push a bigger stack of chips to the center of the table. If Blu-ray fails, it will be the biggest home-electronics failure since Betamax. If it drags PlayStation 3 down with it, it will be one of the biggest corporate blunders of our time.
The people who run Sony aren't stupid; quite the opposite. But every outlook carries its own internal logic, which can lead smart people in unsmart directions.
History teaches some lessons about that, too.
Jonathan V. Last is online editor of The Weekly Standard and a weekly op-ed contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer. This essay originally appeared in the June 4, 2006 edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Well, that's OK. I've got more than one Kodak that I burned in 1992 that I've abused, scratched, polished back to usability, and still reference occasionally - and I've not lost a single bit of information.
I guess technology just hates you.
try it in 2050 or 2092
Get a DiskDoctor, and watch it polish the scratches right out. Problem solved.
I read an article on blu-ray several years ago and it described each disk coming in a case and that the disk and case were inserted as one unit. It sort of looked like a see through floppy disk.
did it look like post 18? Spktyr posted that
(Spktyr pinged for courtesy)
Yes, pretty much. Except it was a see through blue.
I wish they would bring this "case" back, i'd buy a new dvd burner if it used all the formats like drive in post 26
BLURB:
Although Blu-ray and HD DVD are both high-definition media formats that rely on blue-laser technology, there are some important differences between them. One of these is capacity. Because a Blu-ray player utilizes a shorter wavelength blue-violet laser than an HD DVD laser, it can focus even more closely to read more densely packed data. This allows a Blu-ray disc to have higher capacity. A standard HD DVD can hold 15 GB per side (30 GB on a dual-layer disc), whereas Blu-ray can hold 25 GB per side (50 GB on a dual-layer disc). More capacity per disc could mean more extra features included with movies, higer quality audio, or more interactivity wityh titles should the studios choose to incorperate these features on the discs they release.[End quote]
The Blu-Ray players are priced at $1K. That is historically comparable to the cost of other media when new.
Significantly, movies issued on Blu-ray are similar in cost to those issued on DVD when it was new, or on Laserdisc.
All these prices will come down. The Blu-Ray disk will hold more than five times what a DVD will hold, whch will make it the standard for backing up computer files. This space is needed because of the growth in video content on home computers.
I was looking at my hard drives: I have over 100 GB of photos from just one year of shooting with my KM 7D. It would take me about 150 CDs or 25 DVDs to back that up, but only about 5 Blu-Ray disks. Which do you think is most convenient?
The new media always cost much intially. Blank CDs appeared costing about $7 each when they were new! (They probably cost pennies each to make.)
Blank DVDs were similarly expensive at first: now good (Taiwanese, not mainland Chinese junk) ones are readily available for about 35 cents @.
Sony may have a winner with Blu-Ray.
BUT (very important!) the format designer does not always reap the profits. Many manufacturers will be making and selling Blue-Ray equipment. The royalties are only a small proportion of the sales price of a player or recorder.
I am reminded that Zenith designed the system we use for stereophonic FM broadcasts; and when this became known, I rushed out and bought Zenith stock. Everyone benefited from this innovation, except Zenith, which was run into the ground by inept management, and eventually sold to a South Korean company. The value of my stock went from $18/share to $0 (nothing). Not one of my better investments!
Sony will make more money just selling those movies than on the format royalties. The importance of the format is that it will make the movies desirable. A good movie, even an old one, will look great on Blu-Ray. The garbage dumps will fill with discarded VHS tapes: just wait and see!
we will see, we will also see what kind awful copy protection comes with it. I'm hoping to skip both of them and go to holographic storage. :)
I'll say it's less robust - it apparently isn't big enough to hold a full 1080p movie (which Blu-ray can) and supports only 1080i. That doesn't mean it won't eventually "win", though I suspect movies will eventually be distributed on 100GB flash memory cards and through Internet downloads to multi-terabyte home theater systems, killing both disc formats and making any such "win" short-lived.
Bluraysucks.com makes a good listing of the D.R.M. that's built into them. Of course wikipeda also has entries on both Blu-ray and HD-DVD.
All that said, it would be a shame if the companies working on Holo-format decide to treat their customers like thieves and include DRM specs into the formal format.
CD/DVD is a short-lived technology. Fortunately, it is digital and can be downloaded and converted.
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