There's no easier way to find out why a company isn't the leader in its marketplace than buying its products. Today I got an e-mail from Sony, advising me that its Connect on-line music service will be phased out over the next few months. What they're really announcing is that they are dropping their proprietory music compression format, ATRAC, after discovering that nobody else wanted to use it.
They promise to help me to convert my existing music library to MP3 format. Thanks for nothing, guys -- I would have done it that way myself if I'd had half a brain, because Sony has not only previous but current form here. Everyone remembers the VHS-Betamax battle in the 1980s, when Sony was forced to concede defeat despite having the superior product. The company now seems to be facing a similar fate not only with ATRAC, but also with its Blu-ray high definition disc product. There's not much to be said for being a lone wolf in a fast-changing market. Apple is almost the only company that's managed to pull that off in the consumer electronics field, and even that's been a close-run thing at times.
Then there's pay-TV. I have a healthy antipathy for the Murdoch empire, as anyone who has been following this blog will have realised. So I was happy to sign up with "ON Digital" when I returned to London in the late 1990s. Sadly, ON Digital was managed by morons (and their set-top box was pants); it became ITV Digital (no improvement) and then, last year, was bought by Sir Branson and rebranded as Virgin Media.
And it's still not very good. The new management promptly picked a fight with Sky that led to the removal of several of Sky's channels from the service -- though there was, of course, no corresponding reduction in price. The quality of the service remains patchy at best -- channels are regularly "Not available at this time" (we're talking BBC1 here, not something obscure) and the much-touted video-on-demand service has never worked for me at all.
To fix this last problem, I gave them a call last week to see if I could get a new set-top box, as the current one dates back to the ITV Digital days. After a short bout of menu-hopping I got through to a live person, who asked me some security questions, but then said she couldn't help with my actual problem. She offered to pass me on to their faults department. There was a bit of canned music, then an automated voice came on -- and started asking me more security questions. I ploughed on until I was asked for....the last four digits of the number of the bank account that I used to pay my bills!! Has any of their clients ever been able to answer that question at the first time of asking? I gave up at that point and am currently building up my strength to have another go. If I don't get a satisfactory response, I may yet have to sell my soul to Murdoch.
And then there's my lifetime support of Leyton Orient...no, let's not go there.
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