I haven't got a clue (and neither has Sony)
Sony announced yesterday that it was pulling out of the PDA marketplace by stopping making the Clie range. There has been much analysis already of this on all the usual suspect sites online.
The good news is that they are managing the process in such a way that existing customers won't get shafted. They deserve a HUGE amount of kudos for this, I wouldn't expect that kind of attitude from Palm, Dell or Apple.
Most of the Sony gear that I do like now like their MDR 7506 and 7509 headphones are professional gear that is hard to get hold of, I am saddened that the business isn't everything that it could be.
Having in the past been involved with Palm and Sony as consultant and a customer I just wanted to share some observations and unanswered questions that had been brewing about their portable devices for a while:
- Why did the Clie range never support the Mac community? Their overly designed devices were ideally targeted at these non conformist computer users. Palm and Handspring supported them, whereas Sony made their product as Mac unfriendly as an iPaq
- Why has Sony bought into to PalmSource and Symbian?
- Why has it taken them so long to get their act together on iPod type devices and services when they were the first people to have a Palm PDA that could play MP3s
- Why is the new Vaio iPod wannabe so ugly and complicated looking?
- Why is there no joined up thinking going on using content to leverage platforms? Do you think that Microsoft would have sat on their hands for this long with the kind of diversity of resources that Sony Corp could knit together?
- Why did they expect people to buy a 600USD device? This is a known dead price point in tech marketing circles, almost the price of a no make laptop and well over double the price of many competitor devices
- Why were Clies so slow to adopt wireless?
- How long are they going to allow Playstation to carry the rest of the business?
- Will SonyEricsson phones benefit from the Clie product design team?
