Month: January 2007

Greedy Business ™ : Refusing Reality!

Posted by DarkJedi – January 23, 2007

The recording industry and the movie industry is still locked in a fierce struggle between its enormous earnings and its customers. Questions like the next-gen DVD format, DRM, Digital Music and the Distribution Model is becoming a daily debate on the Internet. Meanwhile the Greedy Business ™ continues its hollow crusade against its customers in a poor attempt at gaining some earnings, when innovations and reason fail completely! They keep on forcing companies like Microsoft to incorporate tons of DRM in its products – DRM that will annoy and alienate consumers worldwide according to the BBC. At the same time news is running across the Internet showing that one DRM-scheme after the other becomes obsolete, as programmers finds way around the annoying software – leaving the average customer in a DRM-hell while the pirates gets the best and most functional product…

Even though many companies among the Greedy Business ™ understands that DRM is loosing its battle and is only ending up hurting their image and loosing customers, they still refuse to act. The boss of Real admits that DRM needs to go, and he is the CEO of company that makes a living on selling DRM-infected music! They are faced with a distribution model that doesn’t cut it for the digital markets and therefore they are loosing grounds to independent labels fast! It is a wonder that companies as big as the big four, with all their analyst, having seen the signs before? They have lost all credibility with their ridiculous lawsuits among customers, and failed to see the market that was right in front of them and lost it all to Apple, who now sits firmly on the throne. The problem for the Greedy Business ™ is that Apple is the key to the digital music distribution and they have lost control with Apple – and they want control! More than Gollum wants his precious.. Simply put: Their analysts failed them in every way possible and they ended up loosing the distribution model of tomorrow (or rather today) to Apple, while they were busy suing their customers making Apple look good and them looking rather tarnished…

Now they are realizing that times are changing and the new time is now. Universal admits that they have finally realized this. They can no longer keep using the tactics they used to sway the French when they were met with the claims of tomorrow! Luckily for them the French are easy to scare and even easier to buy! Websites are now creating the link between music composers and performers and their fans – without labels! Of course the Greedy Business ™ respond quickly by using the massive army of lawyers (which by now must be many times larger than their group of signed musicians) and tries to gain control of these markets using untruthful allegations like they have done up until now. Of course the best way to shut down a competitor that does a better and cheaper job than you is to have his ISP shut down the website, when you cry foul… The Greedy Business ™ simply doesn’t understand the basics of the Internet and the great distribution model that lies within… The social commitment from people and the cheap access to information makes it an ideal replacement for labels, but hey – you can always cry “piracy” and sue everybody! That’s a business plan as well … and has been for the last decade if you talk to the CEO’s of the Greedy Business ™. They have refused to admit that their distribution model is failing and only a few of the smaller companies actually does anything about it, like giving more power and earnings to the actual performers/artists (the one that make all the content and the money earning potential in the first place). Meanwhile organizations like RIAA and MPAA keeps adding more and more dirt to the public image of the Greedy Business ™.

The digital music sales continues to rise with an amazing speed and the CD sales continues to fall, like the DVD sales … People are looking for the digital alternative – but DRM simply makes this too complicated and frustrating and often piracy is the only real alternative out there! The Greedy Business ™ keeps on blaming piracy, while they fail to realize that they have not given people a real alternative to piracy. It isn’t only about price, and obviously you can’t compete with free, but also about the rights you buy. When you buy DRM-infected music you have bought a product of much less value compared to one without DRM. When you want to buy one without DRM what alternative do you have, save piracy? The Greedy Business ™ cannot answer this question as they know the answer would reveal what they are actually using DRM for: Controlling the market and the consumer’s habbits – NOT controlling piracy, which they by now must know is impossible (even though they naturally claim every year that their efforts are working… *sighs*)…

The future has already begun. The demand is there. The technology is there… But the Greedy Business ™ isn’t ready to provide us with the alternative, like the pirates have been for over a decade! They keep on believing that suing their customers will keep the past alive and their failing distribution model above water. They have by now blamed everyone, save themselves, for their failing sales… With so many analysts employed one would think that they could see things a bit clearer and perhaps a bit sooner. They failed to see the market Apple saw clearly, they failed to see what their customers wanted in digital distribution, but kept on restricting content and adding more and more DRM… One day soon they will see just how far from reality they have swayed – and when they do realize that their market is gone, taking over by someone else… and their army of lawyers won’t be able to help them (perhaps except in USA with their lack of reality in their lawsuits!) …

Statue of Liberty

Vista : Into the Storm

Posted by DarkJedi – January 22, 2007

Microsoft has a lot of work to do these days. The problem is that its newest windows version, Vista, has met a storm of bad news, reviews and criticism on the Internet lately. Articles claim that Microsoft is way past the glory days, because people are past the era where a new version of Windows adds something so new that an upgrade is needed. Simply put: The question was already relevant when we had to move from a perfectly functional Windows 2000 to the more “fancy” Windows XP, but now we need much better hardware for even less new real functionality! While it is perhaps the less uninspiring sides of Vista, that makes it difficult for people to see the need for an expensive and time-consuming upgrade, most people simply do not see it as revolutionary in any way, like Microsoft tries to hype it to be! Linus Thorvalds is among them, like ZDNet, who finds it uninteresting! There are plenty of articles that say the same thing. Where it goes sour for Microsoft is when sites, that businesses listen to starts to say the same. Like Walter Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal or when the Phillipine News writes that Vista is tough to work with at the office and should be avoided!

It is a time for Microsoft where they need to ensure that people go “their” chosen path and not “deviate” from the path. The problem is that an upgrade – and this time it is both Windows and Office – is a big and costly event for businesses and government and other public offices. This is the time where they can chose a different path than that of Microsoft, and therefore it is important to Microsoft that they manage to sell the hype and keep people vendor locked in for a good many years yet – ensuring a nice bit of gold for the future! Naturally many are looking and even choosing alternatives, but it is the most important task of Microsoft to minimize this “damage”…

The battle between Microsoft, Apple and the Open Source alternatives are raging currently. It is not what many people expects that eventually one of the sides will win, but rather coexist in various degrees! And we like that – it gives us choice ;) … And we need choice! Choice to ensure that our documents and data are in a format we can always read – even in the future… Microsoft is having a hard time trying to prove that its “Open” XML is such a thing! Many experts are saying that it is nothing more than a 6000 pages long way of disguising their binary formats… But hey, if they can sell the lie to a non-technical government official who makes Microsoft the “choice of the land” they still win :) … Luckily some official bodies still look at alternatives and the EU is one of them. Their latest recommendation of Open Source ensures that Microsoft will get an even more tough time trying to persuade the public sector to keep betting solely on Microsoft’s products, as the report clearly states that Open Source solutions is almost always the cheapest solution! I am not to say if one is better than the other – there are different uses – but if you are a large company or a public sector and you don’t at least have both alternatives installed and test both sides then you shouldn’t be IT responsible! How would you ever know what alternative does your task easiest and cheapest? If you don’t have any real reasons for not using the alternative the professional thing to do is to test it naturally – instead of being locked in to a single vendor and pays whenever he wants you to .. until your competitor out paces you as your costs have grown by too much compared to the competitor!

The public sector and large businesses aren’t the only problems facing Microsoft with its Vista launch. The private customers are having some concerns on this new product. Gamers are eventually being forced onto Vista because of DirectX10, which experts say are Microsoft’s way of forcing people onto a product of which they have no real advantages. The other problem is that Vista simply isn’t a good design for casual gamers, which is a target group Microsoft had hoped to entice better with Vista! The other problem is that of the many DRM-schemes implemented in Vista, which is always done to help the Greedy Business ™ of Hollywood, RIAA, MPAA and the big Recording Labels… Users only see this as wasting their performance, crippling their systems and giving them disadvantages in its daily use – in one word: Taking the control away from the user on his own system! The Internet is swarming with articles against the DRM in Vista, that tries to make people aware of what this will mean to the average customer (in never irritates the pirate, who has always found alternative ways a few days after the system is out)… This is starting to become a real problem for Microsoft for has been forced to enter the debate and is currently trying to defend its choices and repel some of the many rumors that have flourished! It will be interesting to see if they succeed or they will face real user wrath in the future… perhaps even being forced to change some of the implementation to please users like they did with the activation scheme on XP!

It is a stormy time for Microsoft we has been trying very hard to come up with some sort of arguments for buying Vista, but have instead ended up having to defend the product’s existence. Business aren’t upgrading, they are waiting things out. Private users are sticking with XP, which is fullfilling their needs and see no reasons for entering the DRM-hell of Vista. Governments, cities and other public sector offices are looking at the alternatives at this time of choice! It is a golden moment and Microsoft is loosing pace fast! They haven’t come up with the right arguments, Open XML isn’t a choice as people are starting to find out, Vista isn’t a revolutionary product – barely a bad DRM-infected version of Mac OS X, and the Open Source alternatives are cheaper and based on standards, which saves even more money in the future! Microsoft is way past its golden era and things are starting to look bad – innovation is lost to them! They have been reduced to simple cut-and-paste ideas from Linux and especially Mac OS X and they are considerable slower than the guys at Apple at implementing it … and they cannot find the arguments that sell their products anymore! Must be a hard thing to discover that you cannot even yourself come up with arguments for buying your own product!.. Good luck with that!

Vista Logo

The Console War : Poor Design Decisions!

Posted by DarkJedi – January 19, 2007

The war of the next-gen console is still raging. The fronts are being pushed as frontal attacks are launched almost daily using false hype. Sony is in dire straits at the moment as they desperately needs the momentum of a successful PlayStation 3 in their next-gen DVD format war, where the battle between Blu-Ray and HD DVD is entering a critical stage… A stage, where Sony would have hoped to had announced the massive success of its PlayStation 3 and thereby the Blu-Ray player hiding within. While most of us with a bit of understanding for technology couldn’t see the benefit of using the slow Blu-Ray drive Sony was sure in its mission: To ensure that people get vendor-locked in to paying Sony royalties with Blu-Ray. For game developers, like the ones that worked on the PlayStation 3-version of Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, the slow speed of the drive actually makes them put the game content on the drive several times to increase the read speed of the drive. Others instead use almost full game installations on the hard drive to avoid having horrible load times! Why Sony chose to include a 60 GB hard drive is obvious: It is needed to avoid the slow loading times of their “wonderful” Blu-Ray drive… What a design decision! No wonder that the PlayStation 3 is not in high demand!

Apart from the horrid Blu-Ray drive the PlayStation 3 is having certain problems because of all the copy-protection DRM software Sony has put in their expensive pierce of hardware. The occasional blinks people are reporting is not caused by the PlayStation 3 to be out of performance power, but instead caused by the HDCP DRM, that tries to ensure that you do not copy those Blu-Ray movies on your PlayStation 3! … And should you decide to try and expand your PlayStation 3 capabilities (why you buy one in the first place is beyond my understanding, buy hey!) make sure you buy Sony’s stuff, or you will void your warranty!

This all adds up for Sony, who is in great trouble, as nobody is really buying their brand new console because of two things: Price and Titles! There simply aren’t any titles that are giving people a reason to buy this ill-conceived console! Sony cannot hide the numbers any more – even their scaled down expectations did not cut it! This problem will keep on growing as no game developer will spend many years and great investment in trying to develop a number one hit game for a platform with a little more than 1 million consoles, when they can develop easier for Xbox360+PC easier, with better tools and go for a market with more than 250 million gamers! Already game developers are scaling down their PlayStation 3 investments! Meanwhile Sony can see Microsoft getting exclusive hit after exclusive hit on their XBox360, like the speed-selling smash-hit, Gears of War and the newcomer on the hit-block, massive-selling Lost Planet… Perhaps Sony should have listened to guys like John Carmack of id Software and Gabe Newell of Valve.

While Bill Gates is often a better speaker than the designer of the PlayStation at Sony, he is firm in his criticism of the competing consoles he does have a valid point! The Xbox Live! service did things right… Both Sony and Nintendo are trying to copy that success in their consoles, but they will start from zero, while Microsoft can boast of a well-earned success at this point! There is good money in Live! at this time – and money is nice when you want to hit Sony where it hurts: The price! … Well, if the guys at Microsoft were a bit smart they would VERY quickly pick up the phone and call Blizzard and make the deal of their life: Make sure that World of WarCraft comes to XBox360 and becomes an exclusive title! That alone would put Sony in their coffin and seal it nice and tight!

PS3

Greedy Business ™ : Controlling Markets

Posted by DarkJedi – January 18, 2007

There are certain businesses where happy customers and feedback from consumers mean absolutely nothing, where money matters all – no matter the cost! At one time, not long ago, it looked like EMI might the first music label among Greedy Business ™ to start their renewal process and become more opened, customer-minded and face the reality of digital distribution. However, when a company is in problems and wants a future buyer to see them as an attractive investment you want to look like the greedy old business you once were – not one that brings innovation and promise of survival in tomorrows musical landscape. So a great change of management once again happened at EMI, where they have shifted management chairs around again to return to their old, greedy ways. Not only EMI does crazy shifts like these in management. The most outrageous one happened at Sony, where the guy responsible for the Rootkit fiasco, which happened to be one of the greatest fiascoes ever in the history of music and customer-relations, just got a promotion… Now he is in charge of their entire digital products department – So expect more rootkits from Sony soon! So much for foresight in the Greedy Business ™…

Meanwhile certain smaller music labels are following the trends and realizing that their distribution model needs to change if they are to survive. Jamendo has just announced that they will share revenues with their signed musicians to an amount unheard of in the Greedy Business ™. This could prove a popular decision among consumers, who lately have turned down the thumb on the great “protectors” of the Greedy Business ™ in a recent poll at Neowin.net! Especially RIAA and MPAA gets customer-hatings! Funny, I guess they never expected people to mad about their trend of suing their own customers to Hell for a decade? Meanwhile we continue to hear Greedy Business ™ complain about piracy. In their latest report they see digital music sales soar, but not cover their supposedly declining CD sales. “Pirates” they claim once again. Funny, everyone knows that the DVD sales are declining slowly now because of people wanting the alternative, but no one at IFPI considers this to be the case with the CD. Listen up, morons! You are loosing sales because you haven’t come up with the follow-up on the CD: Digital Music. NO! We don’t want that DRM-infected crap – we want high quality music with the same rights as CDs, to rip and use on our portable devices. DRM does not ensure your music or your movies! When the encryption of the DRM-infection is bypassed only the legal consumers will become irritated and frustrated by it – not the pirates! There is no copy-protection that will work and everyone knows it – even the Greedy Business ™. Ars Technica has written an article that, like I have previously described it, tells how the movie business uses the DRM. Not to protect their content from pirates, but to protect their markets by forcing less technically strong users to have their basic content rights removed or encumbered by DRM… This is not copy-protection and the Greedy Business ™ knows this – it is merely a poor and ill-conceived attempt at protection an already dead, ancient distribution model in a digital reality! The worse part of this story is that the Greedy Business ™ for some reason has managed to sell this lie to politicians who protect them (probably for a good dollar or two) and even make them come up with mad suggestions like forced DRM on webcasts!

There is nothing I can say that will make the Greedy Business ™ understand, only money can talk their language (which must sound something like orcs in The Lord Of The Rings)! Therefore all I can do is to hope that everyone who reads this blog makes their voice heard by NOT buying DRM-infected crap and making politicians aware of the problem! Stop voting for those ill-informed politicians that mess up our lives and prolong the lives of the Greedy Business ™. They need to die so that our digital future can begin and we can fully take advantage of our computers and other digital devices!

Statue of Liberty

High Definition : Progessive War!

Posted by DarkJedi – January 16, 2007

After CES the next-gen DVD format war turned nasty. Until now most of the press releases and hype shouted from the two camps have been rather sober, but now they are both releasing that this will be a long and devastating war. The hybrids have entered the war, promising to prolong, but not help either win the war. Customers are still leaving the two duke it out, while staying away from choosing sides. This of course means that neither side can claim victory – even though that hasn’t stopped Sony from doing so. In the mean time people are starting to test the two formats up against one another and finding out the truths. Currently HD DVD has three main advantages, if you look at this war from the eyes of the consumer for once, and not who’s company will earn more from winning:

  1. Cheaper and easier to produce. Toshiba found a cheaper and more cost-effective choice, which does not suffer the problems of the more advanced Blu-Ray blue diode, which has caused much production despair at Sony. The problem is mainly based in the fact that the blue diode of the Blu-Ray is more advanced and has to be cut more flawlessly than that of the blue diode of HD DVD to be able to read the more densely packed information – yielding in greater storage capacity.
  2. HD DVD currently has the best result on screen with less artifacts – according to test on Ars Technica. Apparently there are some problems with artifact in the Blu-Ray encoding/decoding on the tested machines.
  3. It is easier to decrypt and copy. Already HD DVD allows “Managed Copy”, but it is also restricted to “only” having AACS-copy protection, which is already broken at this point. This means that people can make backups and distribute the legally bought content onto their portable devices, which is a very nice freedom to have, when you pay good money for the product.

While there is no clear winner both aim lower and lower in their arguments against one another and customers remain unaware of the true differences between the two. Most just pick Blu-Ray because it has bigger capacity (which Toshiba has just made a thing of the past). The PlayStation 3 was suppose to put the last nails in HD DVD’s coffin, but Sony’s production problems and failing demand for the new generation is making the Blu-Ray look a bit troubled. It still has the largest support among the film studios, but so far most titles and the best one have been released on HD DVD. In the last great war of formats between VHS and Betamax (supported by Sony), Sony lost on Betamax – mostly because they would not allow the adult film industry to use its format. This was a great misunderstanding of the consumer, who wasn’t about to choose a format without adult entertainment and therefore Betamax lost – costing Sony a fortune! This time around, however, Sony hasn’t learned its lesson, as adult filmmakers have chosen HD DVD, based on two main points:

  1. It is cheaper and easier to produce HD DVD, compared to Blu-Ray.
  2. Sony won’t allow adult films on Blu-Ray.

Of course at this point this doesn’t make HD DVD a clear winner and therefore speculation have begun that question whether a winner will be found among the two or a third party will go in and snatch victory among the already irritated consumers. Some have suggested that Flash-technology combined with broadband will win, or the newly announced VMD, while others, like myself thinks that this discussion will reach another level when InPhase launch their highly competitive product later this year. In the end my guess is that Holographic storage will win the day, if optical storage last that long :)

TV

Vista: Not Enough – Too Late!

Posted by DarkJedi – January 15, 2007

After a great struggle within Microsoft finally managed to get their latest Windows version out the door, Windows Vista… For many years they have had to listen to people’s rant about security in XP, lack of support for new hardware, being an ugly operating system compared to Mac OSX and even Linux. Now it’s here… And then what does people say?

There has already been many comparisons between Vista and the current version of Mac OS X (“Tiger”) – while we eagerly await the next version of OS X, called “Leopard”. Most of these comes to the same conclusion: Vista is almost closing the gap, but not yet… This is of course bad news for Microsoft who must be starting to fear that Apple is drawing customers away from Windows with Tiger and especially the upcoming Leopard, as customer-awareness of Apple has grown exponentially after Apple released the iPod. Of course Microsoft still has one great advantage: application support! … The application base on Windows is still far greater than that of Mac OS X – and Microsoft has always protected backward compatibility to ensure that they keep it that way!

Then apart from a prettier user interface, that is not quite on pair with Mac OS X, what can the user expect from this long-overdue version? … Well, not much actually! There is no killer feature or must-have functionality in Vista – and that is pretty much Microsoft’s main problem these days! How do you sell something, when you have no real arguments? You can’t really sell a product for its appalling DRM-schemes, that is sure to keep people annoyed from this moment on? It is always interesting to see how the marketing department handles selling crap and shackles to people…. But.. If you don’t want your software to tell you what to do you better start looking for another solution, and there are plenty to choose from!

Well, if you can’t sell it, when there is no killing feature or compelling reason to move what does Microsoft then do? They make up reasons, naturally! They make one reason that will eventually force gamers onto Vista: DirectX 10.. which they claim cannot be “ported” to Windows XP because of “architectural problems”. Well, that’s a load of *beep*, according to famous game-developer, John Carmack…

What about when you buy a new computer? Should you expect Vista on it? Yes, naturally! Microsoft ensures that everyone at one time or another pays them for their “great work”… The problem already for Microsoft is that many OEM-suppliers put too much crap on their Windows-based solutions from the start, making users think that Microsoft is delivering a bad product! When they can’t deliver a proper solution for Windows you would expect them to focus on delivering alternatives to Windows… but that won’t happen, while Microsoft can still use its monopoly status!

It is easy to see why companies wait this one out! Vista simply isn’t worth it at this point! It is a shiny new Windows XP, with a better architecture … But if you don’t need the new architecture why pay that much for something you won’t need! Simple… You don’t! That’s why the schools in England have been consulted to leave Vista out at this point, when choosing operating systems for their computers!

I can easily see the dilemma for Microsoft! They can’t come up with the argument for people who are looking to buy Vista. All the innovative features of the operating system was lost during development, such as WinFS and many others. It is a better product than Windows XP, but only if you count out the DRM-schemes implemented… When you count in DRM and especially the price, where you get less freedom with your product and pay more money, it starts to get interesting to see how marketing will “hype” it! My answer to Microsoft is simple: I went back to Linux, after having used Windows again from Windows 2000.. Now I’m using Windows XP and Kubuntu – and when XP won’t work anymore I will consider the following choices: Vista without the DRM or Linux! Simple as that!

Vista Logo

Greedy Business ™ : The Transition

Posted by DarkJedi – January 12, 2007

It is the time of change. You can feel the fear oozing from the CEOs of the Greedy Business ™ as they are facing uncertain times. They are realizing that their current DRM-schemes doesn’t work. No one, apart from the legitimate customers, have been scared away by DRM, copyrighted content is still being pirated! “Once the rabbit is out of the hat it is in the open – and this type of rabbits breeds rapidly”…

EMI is perhaps the company among the Greedy Business ™ that understands technology best and are willing to experiment. It is therefore no wonder that it is EMI that is first to announce that they have stopped all production of Compact Discs containing DRM. Many others in the business understands that DRM is heading out the window – either fast or slow!

Why is this move coming now? Well for two reasons! One is the ever declining sales, which is apparent now to the Greedy Business ™ has nothing really to do with piracy! The second is that the public image of the Greedy Business ™ is hurting bad and they are in dire straits about needing a good image – not just for customers, but for musicians as well! The second reason is really that Greedy Business ™ is realizing that their distribution model and business model is gone from underneath them and they never saw it coming. For decades they have made a more than decent living leeching on talented musicians, who never got their cut of the cake in this rotten business. The problem now is that musicians are finding free alternatives provided by the Internet, which is clearly illustrated in the band called Koopa, who just made it to the Top 40 without having been signed to a music label! This scares the living daylights out of the Greedy Business ™ as they know perfectly well that they are mostly without arguments for their own existence at this point in time! YouTube and MySpace is perfect places for becoming more famous than already famous musicians, and in no time!

The problematic DRM is then suppose to go to relight the fires of the music companies, who needs to get into the digital music distribution, where Apple sits firmly on the throne – not in any mood to share power! They are in desperate need of a better image! Unlike Apple, who is seen as a cool and “fair” company, the Greedy Business ™ major issues with their image after having sued their customers into Hell for a decade! They are known to be using the most low of methods to ruin their customers, when they are incapable of selling enough to fill their fat wallets! This is typical of companies who have lost every gift at innovation and just wants to earn money without having to renew their business!

There is a power struggle going on and the outcome might surprise everyone! I think that letting DRM walk is only going to be the first step as the companies in the Greedy Business ™, including the movie industry, will start to compete more with each other to become the next big player in digital distribution. I predict a lot of lawsuits in the coming years as this is what they know and what they are used to use when they try to protect their markets. It will take them many years to learn the rules of a free market again, and those that remembers last will not make it! Interesting times, indeed!

Statue of Liberty

The Console War : Sony Battered!

Posted by DarkJedi – January 12, 2007

While the Christmas sales are over and the initial hype of the PlayStation 3 launch have long gone the time has come to back to reality for Sony… Their console isn’t selling as much anymore, which must be a terrible discovery for Sony. While their PlayStation 2, where they did things right, sold more than 1.4 million units during the Christmas sales, which is six years after its launch, the demand for its newly launched PlayStation 3 is already stalling!

This is a problem for Sony in more than one way. Once demand starts slowing you are sending out a message to the many game developers that your platform won’t be in the hands of that many people, which quickly makes it an unattractive platform to bet new game titles for. There is nobody who will bet double-digit millions in developing games that can sell to a maximum user base of a million worldwide. Sony’s trouble were mostly because of the need for Sony to push the Blu-Ray technology together with the PlayStation 3, but failed to have the manufacturing skills for the Blu-Ray diode. This meant that Sony couldn’t produce the PlayStation 3 in large numbers, and thereby failed to meet the original demand. At this point a little more than a million PlayStation 3 consoles have been sold worldwide, which is a terrible small amount compared to almost 4 million Wii’s and 10 million XBox360s. Another problem occurs with the game developers when you do not deliver them good development tools – especially if you want them to develop high quality games on a new technically different platform. John Carmack commented that he prefers the XBox360 and that he thinks Sony made some poor design decisions with their PlayStation 3. Sony still desperately needs that killer game for its PlayStation 3, like Microsoft got their Gears of War, who has now passed 3 million (in less than 9 weeks!)…

Meanwhile the war is also happening on words, where Bill gates tries to ridicule Sony’s graphical decision and capabilities on the PlayStation 3, which he claims is inferior to that of the Xbox360 – and he evens considers the XBox360 to has the capabilities of being an all-purpose computer (a claim Sony used to proclaim about their PlayStation 3). On the other hand Sony tries to make headlines, but have recently failed miserably by claiming false truths about their beloved product. Most recently it has become known that Sony lied when they claimed that MotorStorm for PlayStation 3 ran in 1080p resolution – a resolution Sony formerly claimed only the PlayStation 3 was built for… In so many ways have the Sony marketing department failed during the short-spanned life of their most important product, The PlayStation 3, that they have recently thrown in the towel and asked the public to help them! Apparently they are out of arguments for buying the PlayStation 3 themselves by now and cannot create any more hype without lying!

This war is looking more and more grim for Sony. They bet on the wrong horse, and that horse become expensive to develop, expensive to hype and most of all expensive to fail with… They are looking at an almost complete failure with the most promising product and with its upcoming golden earnings horse, The Blu-Ray format, which could have landed the company billions in royalties! Now Sony needs to start gathering up its pierces and face the fact that the company has gone from a huge corporation and a well-known name to simply a large company with a battered reputation in the tech-community!

PS3

High Definition : The Blurry Truth!

Posted by DarkJedi – January 10, 2007

The two camps are now into total war and beginning to understand that many people wants the war to be over. There are many different sides that want to put an end to this war of formats between HD DVD and Blu-Ray: The camps themselves naturally wants to win, as there are a lot of money in terms of royalties at stake, Content-providers wants the successor to the DVD to take off, as DVD sales are failing slowly and consumers are not buying into this war yet, and of course the consumers are the main losers here, that naturally wants the war to end. Both the two camps and the content providers are trying to persuade consumers to jump in the water and start spreading their money. Warner Bros. has even come up with a combined format, that is essentially a Blu-Ray Disc and a HD DVD glued together – back to back, in order to help retail make it through this confusing time, and it appears that this solution, while an undesirable outcome for consumers as the final product of this war, is attracting some retail support. In the Blu-Ray camp, bolstered by the always arrogant Sony, the confidence is overwhelming. Their attempt at ending the war is as blunt and ignorant as can be. They simply declared themselves the winner recently and hoped everyone bought it… *sighs*… Meanwhile Microsoft is trying to boost the other camp’s chances (Any chance to hit Sony is always a welcomed one)!

We, as consumers, can just sit quietly by and watch the children go berserk. Why aren’t they finding the compromise? You might ask… Well, easy! They want more money and they have already put in a high stake! For Sony this is a battle for the death. They lost the last game in VHS vs. Betamax and they haven’t exactly been winners in digital music distribution or player production and are engaged in a seriously tough battle for the next-gen console might. Sony is essentially betting its future business on the fact that the PlayStation 3 will win the console war and with it will come the prosperous royalties, as Blu-Ray wins the next-gen DVD format wars. They are hoping that the PlayStation 3 will plant the seed for the Blu-Ray to become the winner and as usual have been extremely arrogant, in spite of having a more fragile and expensive-and-difficult-to-produce format in Blu-Ray compared to HD DVD. However, Sony is in dire straits at the moment as it is becoming apparent that they are loosing the console war FAST. They have missed their targets by a margin of more than 33% in sales of the PlayStation 3, which is also affecting their stocks! The two main problems with their PlayStation 3 is that it is too expensive and they couldn’t produce enough. Why couldn’t they produce enough? You might ask! The answer is simple: Because of the complexity of the Blu-Ray blue diode which is far more difficult and expensive to produce compared to HD DVD’s diode. This should, more than anything, indicate that Blu-Ray is the wrong choice, when Sony can’t even produce the players, but as usual Sony doesn’t have a lot of market sense and feel with things. They continue to try to persuade everyone to become locked in to Blu-Ray … Wake up, please, and admit defeat!

TV

The Console War : Sony’s Haze of Lies

Posted by DarkJedi – January 10, 2007

The battle is still raging between the three next-gen consoles with XBox360 clearly in the lead with almost 10 million sold consoles and Wii having sold more than three and half million, leaving Sony in the dust with only a little more than a million sold consoles.

This is a major blow to the former market leader, who used to crush any competition to a pulp in former generations. Sony, struggling on two fronts currently with both the next-gen console war with its PlayStation 3 and on the next-gen dvd format war with its Blu-Ray. Normally Sony is considered a strong brand, and in spite of the massive bad press these last couple of years many people still consider it a strong brand. The problem is that among tech-people Sony has lost a lot of respect, not only on the rootkit-fiasco, but on countless of mind-bubbling decisions, rash statements and simple arrogance. Meanwhile Nintendo is threading deep in good press with its massive success, Wii & DS, and Microsoft is hailed for its innovative Live!-service, that is seen as the future of gaming for many, the future for TV and a good business model! Wii’s are the fastest selling item and XBox360 got massive hits in game titles, including Gears of War (which is also boosting Live!-service with new content) and Blue Dragon (which is actually helping Microsoft make a breakthrough in Japan, which is normally a no-Microsoft country on the console-side). Sony wanted to be number one in digital entertainment in people’s homes with the PlayStation 3, but that title appears to be taken by Microsoft by now!

All these facts leads to a troublesome problem for Sony. The only press Sony is getting is bad press, while the PlayStation 3’s sales are stalling quickly – less than two months are being launched with great hype! Sony has bet a lot on the success of the PlayStation 3 (and Blu-Ray as a much expected side-effect!). When Sony can’t make innovative products like Nintendo or Microsoft and keeps getting bad press, what does one do? One simply makes up good press about the PlayStation 3 and Blu-Ray and hopes no one knows the truth! Sony’s marketing hype is simple beyond understanding… They have reached a level beyond arrogance and stupidity that few customers on this planet will understand! It is a sad state for the once so powerful and well-respected company!

PS3