Sony has made a strategic move in it’s online music business and has decided to adopt Microsoft’s DRM as a technology for its online content. Sony had been trying push its proprietary ATRAC along with its own music player for PCs. Smart move, although I don’t support DRM that much. I guess Sony was trying to go the Apple way and create their “own” DRM that would create a technology lock on their customers - thus artificially enhance customer loyalty.
Apple has an incredible customer base, which is full of evangelists that promote Apple and support them in their products and decisions. Sony doesn’t have this. It’s quite obvious that even Apple was taking a gamble with their “own DRM”, but succeeded in it because they were the first to market with their iTunes music store (that actually took the customer point of view of shopping for music) as well as the sleek and cool iPods that were once again superior to products already on the market. Sony didn’t have any of this with their online strategy.
So why try to create a walled garden in very competitive market? Beats me. Sometimes these decisions are made so high up, based on figures and calculations by highly paid consultants that money is poured into the most stupidest of ideas.
(via Guardian Unlimited)
Figures and calculations don’t help at all, if the figures are based on false assumptions.
I guess they made the assumption that the majority of people does not care that they cannot be sure whether their music will work in their players five years from now.
Possibly they also assumed that by limiting how and where the users can use their music the will to pay for music doesn’t drastically diminish.
These two assumptions are quite far-fetched, if you ask me.
Apple’s market share in portable digital music players is huge. Creating online music stores that don’t work with the most popular music player is a gamble.
Posted by hlehto on September 2nd, 2007.