Linked List: April 15, 2012

Sunday, 15 April 2012

How Sony Fell Behind 

Hiroko Tabuchi, writing for the NYT:

The company still makes a confusing catalog of gadgets that overlap or even cannibalize one another. It has also continued to let its product lines mushroom: 10 different consumer-level camcorders and almost 30 different TVs, for instance, crowd and confuse consumers.

“Sony makes too many models, and for none of them can they say, ‘This contains our best, most cutting-edge technology,’” Mr. Sakito said. “Apple, on the other hand, makes one amazing phone in just two colors and says, ‘This is the best.’”

Focus is harder than it looks. I’ve seen Sony executives talking about Apple-style product-line focus for at least a decade, and they haven’t gotten any closer to replicating it.

Google’s Open Web 

Ian Katz interviewed Sergey Brin for The Guardian:

The threat to the freedom of the internet comes, he claims, from a combination of governments increasingly trying to control access and communication by their citizens, the entertainment industry’s attempts to crack down on piracy, and the rise of “restrictive” walled gardens such as Facebook and Apple, which tightly control what software can be released on their platforms. […]

“There’s a lot to be lost,” he said. “For example, all the information in apps — that data is not crawlable by web crawlers. You can’t search it.”

The assumption here is that the only way to search is through Google, and that the “open Internet” is only what Google can index and sell ads against.