Sony, how is that war against your customers going for you? At some point you need to wake up and realize that your customers are not your enemies, they are your boss.

Wake up Sony, you could be one of the greatest and most profitable companies on earth with a few policies changes.

I hope their losses continue to increase. Die you greedy bastards. Before you do, however, give me back my "Other OS". Not that I'm bitter or anything.

Karma is a bitch, isn't it, Sony? May you go down swiftly. I'd love nothing more after all the hostility and the recent rumours of tying PS4 games to the console with required online verification.

Couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of people.

Hopefully they'll go out of business -- and show the world what happens to you when you treat your paying customers like fools and criminals.

it would seem Sony boycotted themselves on the road to insolvency if they don't wake up to the realities of servicing a web-enabled market of distributed systems. Without security and data integrity, people will leave in droves, because they have no option but to put up with whatever lax security is in place this time.

Without their corporate network model, there is nothing to distinguish Sony's hardware from anyone else's except for proprietary cabling, ports, and overpriced equipment as a result. The PS/3 was the first system they ever delivered that didn't go all out to be proprietary in every way conceivable.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the standardized interconnect of digital protocols.

It stopped mattering who you bought your devices from. They all implement the standards as best they can for a price point. Show me an LCD monitor that doesn't do 1080p nowadays, whether it's embedded in a laptop, a monitor, or a television.

I'm just surprised we seem to have stopped at 1080p as a standard just when LCD manufacturing reliability got to the point where we could produce much higher resolution monitors quite easily.

High end displays all compete on lumens and black levels as well as responsiveness (refresh rate.) As technology was cross-licensed and the manufacturing facilities consolidated, what did anyone think? That brand name would really matter all that much in the long run?

People don't forget stupid marketing mistakes like insisting on reporting the Peak Power Level a Sony amplifier can handle instead of the Continuous Power Level ratings used by high-end amplifier manufacturers.

People don't forget having their credit card information stolen.

People don't forget about being without service for over a month.

People won't buy your products just for the tag line "SO, New York!"

Be honest now, if you break a boycott because a company releases a product you want then you were never really boycotting them in the first place, you were just trying to present your lack of interest in their products as a principled stance.

Also, Sony has been pretty hit and miss on quality. For example, their receivers have lots of reports of inadequate thermal design and solder failures. Generally lots of cases of Sony obviously trying to cut costs and sell on reputation, and that measure has come back to erode reputation.

So we are left with a company that is making shoddy products, has a poor security record, is pretty anti-consumer in various technologies, and charging a premium on top of all of that. Sony has to do some drastic moves to stay relevant.

While the media wing may not be what is losing money today, it is their Big Media stake that is ruining the electronics company.

From lost focus on developing the best HW for consumers and Spending time on things that electronics enthusiasts have come to hate them for (Rootkits, DRM, supporting MPAA/RIAA).

Being a part of the MPAA/RIAA, Sony electronics now thinks first about DRM and second about customers. So PS3 is the first device to get Cinavia, and yet it still won't play .MKV files. Making it somewhat crappy as a media player.

If Sony hadn't jumped into the media game it would have been better focused on building devices people want, there would have been no Rootkits, no membership in MPAA/RIAA. If that Sony hit hard times, we might actually be sad. But instead Sony Media/Electronics is an unfocussed anti-consumer juggernaut that we get joy seeing go down the tubes.

If rumors are true about PS4, Sony's war on consumers is going full force with zero backward compatibility and technology to block used games.

IMO they deserve to go down the drain.

>> "Why the hell are people so obsessed with the OtherOS crap?"

Because we paid for it, and then got treated to a surprise game of Sophie's Choice with OtherOS or network connectivity for the games we already owned.

If Sony came into your house and disabled even just a seldomly-used button on your remote control, I'll bet you'd bitch about it every time their name was mentioned - regardless of whether you could go out and buy a separate remote for that button or not.

It's not so much about OtherOS as the principle of ownership.

Assuming you mean the PS3...

The purpose of PS3 was to sell Blu-ray and kill HD DVD, which was disliked (a) because it wasn't a Sony product and (b) because it wasn't consumer hostile. That was it.

PS3 succeeded. It doesn't matter that on the surface it was loss making. Sony was able to use the PS3 to push BD and kill HD DVD, making BD the high definition optical disc standard.

Of course, Blu-ray itself is a piece of utter garbage, and as a result has no chance whatsoever of ever reaching DVD's ubiquity, something HD DVD at least had a chance of doing. Even now, sales figures look better than they are purely because it's getting difficult to buy a DVD of a new release without buying it as part of a Blu-ray/DVD bundle.

But that doesn't matter. The important thing is that Sony "won" that war. To that extent, the PS3 was a success.

My boycott started when I had a notebook from them with a finicky touch pad and a power button that slid under the case occasionally, causing it to power cycle until you unwedged it.

I sent it in, they told me it was water damage on the motherboard, and it would cost $1350 to replace it (it was a $1200 notebook). I was very careful to avoid water on that thing.

I said no, they sent it back, and it wouldn't even power on, and the indicator lights didn't light up when I plugged it in. I'm guessing they just didn't bother reconnecting anything after disassembly, but the way the case was set up, even after unscrewing it, you still needed some special tool to open it up, which I couldn't find.

Turns out I wasn't the only one I knew with a similar story... I too look forward to their demise from the world of electronics, and their war on the people who pay them money for their goods and supposedly "services" but in practice "disservices".

This.

Back around 2000, I had a Sony Trinitron 21" monitor, a Sony MP3 player, a Sony digital camera, and a Sony HiFi system. Back then, Sony was the best within a reasonable consumer price range. Then LCD monitors came along, and I got a 24" Dell and chucked the Trinitron. Sony was making LCDs too, but Dell was selling the biggest consumer monitors by far, and for several thousand cheaper too than anyone else. The "MP3" player actually required every track to be transcoded into some proprietary format, and was replaced with a generic Taiwanese-made player that cost a digit less and stored ten times more on a generic flash card that cost 1/3rd as much per megabyte as a memory stick. The camera was replaced with a model that had interchangeable lenses and compact flash, because most Sony digital cameras (up until recently) had a single fixed lens and didn't take anything other than memory sticks. I was using the HiFi amp until recently, when I discovered that even though I was using it with only digital inputs, the output has a lot more noise than the headphone jack on the motherboard of my PC, fed by a built-in sound "card" that's probably a single chip that cost $2.

You watch, the same thing is going to happen to Apple too. Oh sure, they're making the best stuff now, but they'll go down the same way in a decade or so. Sure, an iPad is the best tablet on the market at the moment, but in a couple of years Asus or Samsung or whoever will be making something with twice the spec, half the price, and it won't be limited to Apple(r) Approved Quicktime Data Formats(tm) only.

Profiteering at the expense of customer experience = short term gains, long term losses.

I don't have any sympathy for this case. What's the point of having warranty deadlines if the company is expected to arbitrarily extend them? If customers want an extended warranty, they should buy them.

Warranty deadlines should be used to defend the company against obvious abuse, and to delight customers by throwing them a bone once in a while. From a psychological standpoint, standing behind the product for an extra 5 lousy days would have acted as a form of intermittent reinforcement, one of the most effective conditioning techniques known.

You don't need to be B. F. Skinner or Steve Jobs to grasp these concepts, you just need to not be a complete moron.

Of course, I'm neither a psychologist experienced in behavioral training nor a CEO experienced at losing billions of dollars, so my advice probably shouldn't be considered authoritative.