Memo to Harvard Business School: The Librie mess should be fodder someday for a marketing study for MBA candidates.
Here Sony is selling the first e-book reader with E Ink technology. And yet the bozos kiss off Americans and other overseas customers and offer only a Japanese-language operating system, forcing English-language customers to hack the machine. What’s more, the Librie can’t even read the most popular commercial formats for e-books, at least not those in the States.
Via a new Wall Street Journal article, you can get some context through an examination of Sony’s chaotic efforts to compete with the iPod and other portable music-players. “Some Tokyo engineers say privately that they remain wary of listening too closely to Sony’s entertainment units, whom they blame for obstructing new electronics products by worrying too much about piracy,” the Journal reports.
Earlier I’d noted that the piracy fixation of Sony’s Hollywood side was leading to too much DRM. But guess what. The Journal says 70 percent of Sony revenue is coming from the elelectronics division. In other words, the copyright tail is wagging the hardware dog. That’s part of a pattern going far beyond Sony. As shown by the copyright lobby’s triumph over the computer and telecom interests in the United States, the size of an industry doesn’t count as much as enthusiasm for such activities as buying up politicians with well-placed campaign contributions.
