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

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…

Personal computers have always been a “one-size-fits-all” sort of device — they’re designed to be customizable so that users can install software, change settings, and make the computers do the sorts of tasks that they want them to do. Never mind that most people would never need to use a computer to, say, run CAD software, render 3D objects, or write code; if you have a PC, you can do all of those things if the need arises.

But there’s sort of a weird tradeoff for all that customizability — the operating system has to be powerful enough to handle all of those advanced tasks while still being user-friendly enough to catch all of the other folks who just use their computers to download music, read the news, play fantasy football, write a couple of documents here and there and goof around on Myspace.  Those people could actually use a much simpler machine to do those things, but they wind up getting a personal computer because that’s what’s available. They don’t know or care about things like hard drive capacity, available RAM or processor speed – they just care that when they turn it on, it does what they want it to do.

Think about all of the problems caused by these casual users for a moment. Most of them aren’t very careful about the software that they install or the websites they visit, so they’re very prone to viruses and phishing scams. Many of them don’t know how to solve simple problems, which has led to a rip-off industry of computer repair businesses that do little more than re-install Windows whenever they’re faced with a major problem. Casual users also clog up bandwidth by jumping on P2P clients like Kazaa or Limewire and allowing people to download all their music without even realizing what they’re doing.

So, why doesn’t a tech company develop a PC that’s not so much a swiss army knife as an actual, personal computer that’s geared at just doing simple things, like running a web browser, running MS Office and a few other essential programs, playing media files, and allowing for video chatting? Such a piece of technology could be locked down a lot easier than a normal PC to be protected against viruses and other malware, and it could be mass-produced and sold at such a low price that everyone would want one. Power needs would be less, which would mean batteries would last longer, and the computers would be so idiot-proof that they wouldn’t need adjustments to their software when things went wrong.

For whatever reason, this idea hasn’t caught on in the PC industry, since the perception is that PC users want to have a lot of features that they don’t really need. But this idea has caught on in the cell phone industry, and it’s the driving force behind the PDA smartphone, which is really just a personal computer with very limited functions.

But the gap is closing quickly. Take a look at the iPhone or the Blackberry Storm and you’ll see a lot of applications that already handle most of what the PC can do. Word processing? Check. Spreadsheets? Check. Powerpoint? Check. Media creation? Check. Media playback? Check. Web browsing? Check. Internet chatting? Check. Gaming? Check. Calendars? Check. E-mail? Check. And the list goes on. What’s more, you can extend the functionality of these devices further with third-party software and bluetooth accessories.

Now, imagine that one of the upcoming versions of these devices includes a set of glasses with LCD screens in them that allow you to experience their interface in a big way. They als0 come equipped with a small bluetooth keyboard that you can pull out whenever you want to do some serious typing, and a sensor you can put on your finger to move your cursor around. Most of the major software developers have created casual versions of their software for the device, and you can even use applications like Adobe Photoshop Elements or Premiere Elements quite easily. There’s no need for a virus scanner, since viruses can’t easily operate on these devices, and even if you get one, you can easily reinstall your firmware and reset everything without worry, because your settings and data are stored seperately from your operating system. What you lose in terms of applications you can easily download again. Would you even need a personal computer anymore?

That’s where things are headed, and personally, I think it’s a good thing. What’s going to be really interesting, though, is the fact that consumers are going to be less interested in new features and more interested in simply being able to use those that are already built in. After all, what good is a powerful piece of software if no one can figure out how to easily use it? The future of software development and hardware design lie not in adding features, but in making the features that already exist easier to use.

It will be a sad day when we have to set aside our many portable devices to embrace those which are smaller, simpler, and easier to use, and the PC as we know it will probably continue to exist in the workplace and in fields where it is needed (like graphic design, engineering, and computer science).  But on the other hand, it will be interesting to see technology reach a point where it is so ubiquitous that everyone has access to it, all of the time. The future may seem a strange and frightening place to those of us who were raised on computers with two-color monitors, floppy disks and 640k of RAM… but the technology should at least be a lot less focused on features… and more focused on being useful.

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.

Sony’s always been a company that’s pushed innovative new products out to the marketplace. In the 1980s, Sony made a killing on portable electronics with its Walkman brand tape players. Sony also lost a pretty well-publicized format war against VHS with its superior, but less popular, Betamax format tapes.

Since Sony first launched the Playstation in the 1990s, it’s been the king of console systems, and by all rights, its beautiful Playstation Portable and Playstation 3 should be murdering the competition right now. But Sony’s having a really hard time with both systems, and though the PSP sales have been picking up lately, the PS3 continues to lag behind the Xbox 360 and the Wii. It’s not for lack of graphical power; the Ps3 is far more powerful than either system, and capable of a level of graphical prowess that outstrips the capabilities of most peoples’ televisions right now. It’s just that Sony’s done a terrible job of convincing people that they actually need all that power in a game console, particularly when there aren’t a lot of games that make the PS3 look like it’s worth the added expense.

I’d say it’s because Sony put the cart before the horse this time around and focused on technology instead of focusing on giving gamers what they actually wanted. Part of the problem, you see, is that Sony simply assumed that gamers wanted more power. And if they asked gamers via market research, “do you want more power in your console?”, they were probably assured that yes, gamers did. Who wouldn’t?

But what Sony didn’t understand was that they had to deliver something more than just a powerful piece of machinery. For starters, they had to deliver software. Sony was so used to being the market leader that they neglected this time around to line up good, exclusive titles. They were very lucky that the PS2 had hits like Grand Theft Auto 3 and Metal Gear Solid 2 early on, because the first year of software for the PS2 was dreadful. They were also lucky that Square came out with Final Fantasy X in the third year and that Capcom introduced Resident Evil: Code Veronica X and Devil May Cry early enough in the cycle to attract attention.

Sony was also very lucky that they decided to include a DVD player in the PS2, since people were purchasing the console around the same time they were upgrading their home systems to include a DVD player. It made sense to pay a little bit extra to get a PS2 that could play DVDs right out of the box, and Sony reaped the benefits of that decision.

But with the PS3, Sony’s been reacting to all sorts of problems, and often, in the wrong way. For starters, the original version of the system included backwards compatibility, memory stick slots and multiple USB ports. Sony’s since dropped these frills in favor of a system with fewer options. The PS3 can play Blu-Ray out of the box, but Blu-Ray doesn’t look much better than DVD on most peoples’ TVs, and there’s almost no noticable difference without an HDMI cable. Sony’s been promising a free online experience for awhile now, but they’ve failed to deliver, while the pay-to-play Xbox Live service continues to go strong.

Sony keeps insisting that people want its products, and that things like a soft economy are holding purchases back. That could be. But it’s more likely that Sony has just done such a bad job of marketing that they haven’t persuaded people that they actually need Sony products any longer. Sony hasn’t followed the basic premise of the marketing concept, which is to develop a relationship with your customer. Instead, they’ve focused on transactional marketing, selling gadgets that can do things, but that don’t necessarily do the things that people want them to do.

Sony’s marketing communication strategy, too, is horrible. They have to have one of the worst ad firms on the planet, and they never seem to answer the question of WHY people would want their products. They avoid talking about features and benefits, and instead try to focus on being cool. That’s a crummy strategy, and it suggests that Sony is stuck in the 1980s still, because people don’t buy Sony products because they’re cool anymore. People buy them because they’re reliable and they’re quality. If they happen to be cool, so much the better. But since the gap is quickly being closed between lower-end and higher-end products, Sony’s got to do more than just tell us how cool they are. They’ve actually got to start caring what people think about their products.

Here’s what I’d recommend for their two game consoles:

I love my PSP, and I usually take it with me wherever I go. It's that awesome.

Sony PSP: Anyone with a Homebrew-enabled PSP will tell you how potentially amazing this little game console is. The Nintendo DS might be innovative, but the PSP is gorgeous, with amazing graphics and awesome abilities. The problem is that Sony is too concerned about controlling the thing, and they keep locking users out of the cool functions because of fears of piracy. This is incredibly short-sighted, since one of the best things the PSP can do is play old PS1 games flawlessly. That’s right — with a homebrew-enabled PSP, it’s possible to play Final Fantasy VII, VIII or IX, or Xenogears, or Metal Gear Solid, or Tekken 3, or Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, or any number of classic PS1 titles. You don’t even need a disc — they play right off the memory stick. And the best thing is, these aren’t ports – they’re the original games.

And what’s Sony doing about this? Nothing, from what I can tell. They don’t seem to want to get into encouraging people to use their beautiful hardware to play old games. Instead, they want people to play the rather mediocre games that come out every year for the PSP. Are they absolutely nuts? Digital distribution would cost them very little to set up (they’re already doing it for the PS3!), and it would add a ton of padding to their bottom line since they’d just be selling digital copies of old games. This strategy has worked well for Nintendo and Microsoft; what is Sony waiting for?

Also, Sony has done a really crummy job of touting one of the coolest features of the PSP: streaming video. Using the RemotePlayer, you can actually stream video from your PS3 to your PSP, even if you’re not home. This has all sorts of awesome potential, but Sony doesn’t seem to want to talk about it. They might think everyone knows about it, but believe me when I say that most PSP an PS3 owners don’t know the half of what either system can do. Sony is really missing out here.

Sony PS3: Aside from telling Sony to work harder to develop better first party software, the real problem with the PS3 is that it has the right set of features for the wrong group of people. Does Sony actually think people are ready to upgrade to Blu-Ray? Many just upgraded to DVD a few years ago, and most don’t have TVs that are capable of 1080p. There was talk at one point about using the PS3 for digital distribution of films and TV shows, but Sony’s done a really poor job of that as well, despite the fact that they own large libraries of movies.

Clearly, Sony needs to cut the price, but more than that, they need to make a case for why people need this overpriced gizmo. More killer apps would help, but putting backwards compatibility back in the mix and using the Internet to throw a bunch of cool free add-ons to the system would also be nice. Maybe Sony should start allowing homebrew developers to create legal apps for the system, or maybe Sony should focus on releasing classic PS1 games for free for PS3 owners. Whatever they do, they need to bring back the idea of the “Playstation gamer,” communicating with their players and making them feel some pride in the platform.

As it stands, the PS3 is a beautiful piece of equipment that just doesn’t do very much because of the lack of software and options available. That’s a shame, because it could do so many cool things… if Sony would quit trying to insist that it’s the ultimate game system / Blu-Ray player.

Fortunately, 2009 is going to bring in a lot of changes at Sony, and maybe, just maybe, they’ll improve their marketing budget. (I hope they’ll fire their ad firm, too.) It’s much-needed; there’s no reason Sony products should be lagging as much as they are. But it just goes to show that if you put all your effort into making a product and forget about the customer, you lose in the end.