On the 1st of July 2009, Sony celebrated 30 years of the Walkman. Two days later, the Telegraph hailed it as the top musical invention of the last 50 years. Yet walk into any electronics store today and Walkmans play a huge back seat amid enormous losses. Not so with the iPod, launched a mere 8 years ago. Why?
Sony talks tech at people without listening to them. The last ten years have seen a continual churn of literally thousands of very expensive, complicatedly named products, lavishing its use of high technology words and descriptions in its branding communications. As with Apple, I get the impression that Sony never fully justifies its product development against customers’ wants. Yet, unlike Apple, Sony doesn’t seem to aim to produce innovative, yet highly usable market leading products, with the last decade seeing a tirade of poorly made, unimaginative ‘me too’ devices. As a former owner of a Sony Vaio VGN FE31H, the computer was expensive, clunky, plasticky and frequently had problems with the Sony firmware. I replaced it 4 months ago with a MacBook Pro 13 inch. Why? Because I’d had enough.
Its marketing campaigns seem equally confused. What was the motive for launching a large campaign for their Walkman NWZ-X1050 and NWZ-X1060 (X series) range in the London Underground when part of the Walkmans’ main features are a WiFi and FM Tuner? Did they realise there was no signal on the Underground?
Sony needs a Walkman to listen to customers’ voices. It needs to humanise the way it communicates its products to people using inspiration for its campaigns from other more successful competitors. However, it desperately needs to get hold of fresh minds to produce new, truly fantastic designs with desirable features… but only if it doesn’t want to see itself as an over expensive Dell or Creative.
And if Sony is interested, they should take note of Microsoft’s superb efforts pulling off a design masterpiece with the latest Zune HD.