A Rough Week for Sony

You'd think that on the 25th anniversary of the iconic Walkman and the launch of the new NW-HD1 Network Walkman that Sony would be riding high. Apparently though, nothing could be further from the truth. The initial reaction in the US to the new Sony players has largely been negative, driven by Sony's adherence to its ATRAC3 DRM technology. Instead of playing the music formats that 99.9% of the public wants, Sony requires that you convert your music into their format. Engadget has more on the power struggles that are happening behind the scenes at Sony:

So why is Sony stumbling? Because of the internal struggle to get Sony Corporation of America to understand that without support for Windows Media, DivX, etc., a personal video player cannot succeed. All the different divisions in Tokyo are sparring over formats and DRM and are out of touch with consumers.

But wait, there's more.

With the state-of-the-market being Apple far in front and a bunch of other guys far behind, Sony's need to play catchup is clear. SFGate has article that nicely summarizes Sony's ambitions, attitude and problems with respect to Apple:

Some analysts question whether Sony will trip over itself as its content divisions -- which make movies and films -- insist on ways to control or limit technologies that deliver that content to consumers.
"The hardware itself is gorgeous,'' said technology analyst Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group. "The problem is they are a company at war with itself. So because they want to own everything, they end up owning nothing.''

Apple, of course, didn't take the NW-HD1 launch lying down:

Sony Corp.'s new hard disk-based Walkman is the product with the biggest brand recognition that Apple Computer Inc.'s market-leading iPod has had to face since its introduction. But it's not the Walkman's 25-year history that bothers Apple executives, it's Sony's marketing message. When Sony released the 20GB Walkman they claimed to have trumped Apple with the number of songs that their device could hold -- 13,000 compared to the iPod's 10,000 -- even thought the total capacity was half of the iPod's. That message is misleading to consumers, according to Apple.

What Sony did was claim that the 20GB NW-HD1 could hold an extraordinary number of songs, much more than the iPod claims to hold. And indeed it was a misleading claim: Sony based their number on heavily compressed songs with terrible sound quality. No reasonable person would accept music that sounded that bad, so less compression for acceptable quality leads to fewer songs on the device.

"If we played the same trick and took it down to 64kbps, you could say the 20GB iPod could hold 10,000 songs," said Joswiak. "You could take it down to 16kbps -- which is the lowest available to us like 48kbps is the lowest available to Sony -- and we could say it holds 40,000 songs. That's something we would never claim because that's just not something a customer would do."

• Rio Says "Me Too!" to 6GB
  
• iRiver H10 Gets a 6GB Boost
  
• New Roc Box Site
  
• Cowon iAudio X5 Info and Photos