Sony: DRM cost us the Walkman. Cory Doctorow:
Sony has admitted that putting DRM into its music players was a mistake that cost it the personal stereo market:
Link [Boing Boing]
My experiences with a Sony Mini Disc player have put me off buying any
Sony product, including cameras and laptops. They seem to be changing now,
but in the past, Sony have been hypocrites. They said "Go create", but
they meant "Go consume". I felt lied to and taken for a sucker by Sony.
These are not feelings you want associated with your brand.
Recap - I bought a MD recorder to make ambient sound recordings for
some video pieces. The DRM system on the MD player made it impossible
to export the recordings off the disc except via the analogue output,
i.e. the headphone socket. In other words, the output of my expensive
new MD recorder was no better than the ProWalkman I already owned. This
is for a product which advertises itself as having digital recording
capabilities - it should really advertise itself as write-only digital recording, which, if you need digital output is about as useful as write-only memory.
The icing on the cake is that clearly this was an arbitrary
decision by some vacuum-brained fainting-goat type somewhere in Sony's
management.
Sony have admitted their mistakes in the area of DRM (which mostly
revolve around not supporting open formats, rather than my particular peeve
described above), which may be the beginning of the rehabilitation of
the brand for me. Sony - I'll be watching.
7:44:36 AM 
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