“Today the new Xperia Tablet starts hitting doorsteps and store shelves. And how do we mark this momentous occasion? Well… Sony engineer Takuya Inaba ripped apart the gear and explained what’s inside. Okay, more like gently opened. Either way, if you love geeking out on parts, then this is the article for you.” Sony – or, well, at least its mobile department – is starting to get very cosy with us on the geek side. I approve – although the company has a long way to go before it cleared its name.
It is always strange to me that people interested in hi-tech, a very fast-moving sector, seem to bear grudges for a disproportionaltely long time. How long before Sony’s rootkit gets forgotten? How long before KDE’s reputation recovers from 4.0? (I had other examples but I have a bad case of the monday’s.)
The rootkit issue was pretty serious – secretly installing software that’s a security risk, then denying it, is not something that’s easily forgotten. Add in their horrible handling of Holtz, the PSN hack, and the removal of OtherOS, and I think a healthy dose of scepticism is… Healthy.
And they screwed up MiniDisc. I will never forgive them for that.
Edited 2012-09-10 10:00 UTC
The MiniDisc is a valid argument.
But the rootkit belonged to Sony BMG, they probably have very little in common with the Sony part that does tablets. They each have their own presidents, managers, employees.
I think Sony have realised that we’re a scornful lot who will sometimes even carry through our threats to boycott a company, after their past several years of screwups (whether born of malice of incompetence). They want us on-side. I must say, even for a company really pandering to our demographic, it is really unusual for a company to post a teardown of their own device. Perhaps there’s been more of an internal cultural change than we give them credit for.
Because the amount of new products they churn out does not reflect corporate culture and because the people in charge do not actually get changed as often as the company’s product line-up does. I mean, if I show time and time again that I’m totally willing to majorly screw you over to increase my profits do I suddenly become trustworthy if I churn out 300% more products out there in a short time? I’d wager your answer is “hell no,” and that’s the whole thing: tech changes, people don’t.
I raised the same point about Sony recently on the RPi article, and then someone kindly pointed out in a reply that so far, only the cellphone division of Sony (perhaps under the influence of Ericsson) has done stuff to redeem itself among us geeks.
And as Thom points out, there’s quite a lot of things that they should be forgiven for, including removing OtherOS on the PS3 in 2010, continuing to use proprietary memory cards on new products like the PS Vita (2011) when everyone else has switched to SD, and screwing up the first truly reliable data storage support on the consumer market.
Edited 2012-09-10 10:29 UTC
First thing I learned while at the business department of the university was that a good reputation takes years to build and hours to raze.
Every student in class was told this.
Let’s not disappoint them. ;D
How long will we bear the scars of windows ME !
I suspect WindowsME scars will be around, about as long as the scars I got when I was an 8 year old riding my Banana-Seated Schwinn bicycle down the local elementary school slide… crashing at the bottom and gouging out my knuckles and fingers on a bolt that stuck out from the bike. I rode the bike home, bleeding the whole way. Of course, my Mom freaked and took me to the emergency room.
I’m 44 now and they don’t look like they are going away anytime soon. I really learned something useful, to make sure I pull up at the bottom when landing like that. As the next time, I was able to ride down and keep riding.
I was the envy of the school yard, until “D.J.” got an early BMX style bike for Christmas and did a wheelie down the slide in the spring… *CURSE YOU D.J.*
My Schwinn wouldn’t do a wheelie easily.