"Sony missed out on potential sales from MP3 players and other gadgets because it was overly proprietary about music and entertainment content, the head of Sony's video-game unit acknowledged Thursday," reports AP.
"Ken Kutaragi, president of Sony Computer Entertainment said he and other Sony employees have been frustrated for years with management's reluctance to introduce products like Apple Computer's iPod, mainly because the Tokyo company had music and movie units that were worried about content rights.
"Now, Sony's divisions are finally beginning to work together and share a common agenda, Kutaragi said at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Tokyo."
Comment: Reality may be dawning if Kutaragi is finally saying the sort of things everyone else has been saying for five years, or since thinking of buying a MiniDisc player, whichever is sooner.
Of course, it's always easier to blame someone else, and Sony Music/Pictures are obvious whipping boys. It remains to be seen whether the idea of "working together" will help Kutaragi to work with Sony's successful PC division, for example, instead of attacking PCs all the time.
Sony could probably have done a decent job of building a digital hub business around its PCs, TVs, audio products and Wi-Fi etc. Instead, Kutaragi pushed the PlayStation and failed to deliver. In fact, the PlayStation now lags the Xbox in terms of media capabilities and digital home strategy, and can't deliver an experience to match Xbox Live.
Kutaragi no doubt has some huge successes on the way with the PSP and PlayStation 3, and will get the credit he deserves for those. However, he should also be big enough to admit that he's overpromised and underdelivered in other areas, and been at least as bad a team player as some of Sony's other divisions.
