[Open Letters] To: Sony Re: PSP Go

To: Sony

Not as cool as a newer, better PSP would be...

Re: PSPGo

Ah, Sony.

When the PSP came out in 2005, I was one of the people who jumped right on it. I couldn’t help myself. The system was beautiful, and it had some really cool games that made my GameBoy Advance and Nintendo DS games look like toys. To this day, I’ve been a PSP booster.

But the PSP Go baffles me. It’s a little smaller than the PSP-3000, and it looks kind of cool. But why would I ever need this device if I’ve already got a perfectly good PSP? It doesn’t do anything different. It has fewer features than the PSP I’ve already got, and it can’t play any of the games I already own. Its control scheme looks like it would cause my hands to cramp up. And, most important of all, it’s about $80 more than I’d spend if I replaced my original PSP-1000 system with one of those shiny new PSP-3000 models. $250, for a system with fewer features than the one I’ve already got? You have got to be kidding me, Sony.

Clearly, your marketing team was asleep during their marketing strategy classes, because the whole concept of the PSP Go is flawed. You want to repackage a 4-year-old handheld and sell it as geek chic. But in doing so, you’ve made it incredibly impractical to own. It’s a device that relies on digital downloads to play games… and yet it can only download on the wifi 802.11b standard, which ensures slow download speeds. Hrm. You’ve only made about 100 games available for download, and yet you’ve missed many obvious titles, such as Dissidia: Final Fantasy, Lumines and Metal Gear: Portable Ops. Hrm again. The games are being sold at full retail with no associated bonuses, which means that they’re going to be more expensive than their used counterparts. Hrm once more. Did you marketing team sleep their way through economics as well, somehow concluding that during a recession, people spend more money on items than they might otherwise?

What really galls me is that you put out a press release this week announcing that hardware sales for the PSP are up 300%. What that really means is that you’ve shipped out new hardware to retailers for the Christmas rush. It has nothing to do with what consumers are buying. You want people to think that the PSP Go is the must-have item right now. Maybe a few will fall for it. But I have yet to see a line for PSP Go hardware forming at any stores I’ve been in. The guys and girls at my local store are telling me that no one’s very interested. Why should they be? It’s like taking a McDonalds happy meal, putting it on a fancy plate, charging a dollar extra for the presentation and then slapping on an extra fee for the toy, soda and fries. The happy meal was fine the way it was. There’s no reason to try to make it into something better.

Speaking of which, where’s the PSP upgrade that consumers really want — the one with two analog sticks, four shoulder buttons, and switchable faceplates? The one that can use 802.11g and that has a kicking web browser. The one that has a battery that lasts more than a few hours, and that can play downloadable PS2 games? I’d pay $250 for that system, even if you stripped out the UMD drive and vulnerabilities to homebrew. And if I could use it to access PSN Home and to stream the videos on my PS3 over the Internet and I could hook it into my TV like I can with the PSP-3000, then yeah, I might even pay more.

All I can conclude is that you aren’t listening and don’t care what I have to say. That’s fine, Sony — you’ve always been too cool to let your customers push you around. But you’re going to pay the price for that as the years go by. In the 21st century, the most dangerous move you can make as a company is to treat your customers like they’re not important.

You’re lucky I love my PS3 so much. At least you’ve finally got yourselves straight where that console is concerned. Too bad you had to lose so much ground to Microsoft while you skimmed the market with a ridiculous price point and lackluster software. You might recover during this generation, but you’ve made yourself vulnerable, Sony… and it’s going to be hard for you to keep things up when the next generation of consoles is due and you’re still trying to pay off all the money you sunk into blowing the PS3 launch.

Good luck. You’re going to need it.

-Sean J. Jordan

[Technology Tuesday] The Cry of the Consumer For Fewer Features

Laptops would be so much easier for novices to use if they weren't developed to do so much!

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I have a Blackberry Storm, and I love it — this little device can do so many things that I’m finding myself using my laptop less and less for routine tasks like checking email or goofing off on Facebook, and finding myself anchoring my laptop to a desk more frequently.

Aside from those two devices, I have a PSP that I’ve loaded custom firmware onto, giving me a dedicated entertainment platform that can play so many games that I really have no need for the vast array of video game equipment I have. That means that between three pieces of hardware, I can have more functions than I know what to do with — and every week, I’m finding a new and novel use for one of them.

In the tech industry, one of the big buzzwords over the last ten years has been “convergence” — the idea that as technology evolves, there’s going to be less of a need for multiple devices and that more and more emphasis will be placed on using a single device for all of our technological needs. Right now, it appears that that device is going to be the cellular phone, though it’s possible that once long-distance wi-fi towers are a standard, VOIP will replace cellular technology entirely. In another decade, wireless networking will probably be everywhere, at a price that puts today’s rates to shame. And we’ll all be using a small portable device to take advantage of it instead of the bulky notebook computers we lug around today.

But there’s a downside to technology — the tendency to add new features to products that are already doing a pretty good job. It’s not enough to put out a nice product and leave it alone anymore — every new model has to include some improvement over the past model, even if it doesn’t make sense. We’re rapidly approaching a time when the cry of the consumer is not going to be for more, but for less. And it could happen sooner than you’d think…
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[Technology Tuesday] Sony Needs to Learn How to Be Better At Marketing

Why is this system selling so poorly? Bad marketing, that's why.

2008 was a banner year for Sony — they won the format war with Toshiba and cemented Blu-Ray as the next generation of storage media, they released two killer app games for their Sony Playstation 3 game console (Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots and Little Big Planet) and they saw two great pieces of software push PSP sales in Japan (Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core and Final Fantasy Dissidia). The PS2 continues to sell strongly around the world. They continued to perform well in other consumer electronics markets as well with their TVs, digital cameras, and music players. Sony has always been good at making cool products, and from a design standpoint, they’re still going strong.

So why is Sony suddenly posting a $1.1 billion loss? I’d argue it’s because they’re so good at design that they neglect their marketing. And I’m not just talking about their advertising, either, but their entire philosophy of how products are developed for public use.

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