Category: business

Sony just announced a new PS3 model in Japan. It will sit at a relatively reasonable $342, but it has no backwards compatibility with PS2 games, effectively making the console the only next-gen console without backwards support. Even the Wii plays Gamecube games. Sony fails to amaze me.

There are many great games for the PS2, and many people own the PS2. The ability to continue playing these games on the PS3 is a huge up-sell — the inability to do so is a huge drawback. Does anybody really want a Wii, PS2, *and* a PS3 sitting in their living room? But don’t worry, if you buy this new discounted PS3, you also get a copy of Spiderman 3. Wow, that makes up for the lack of backwards incompatibility… not.

This new, gimped model won’t be released in the US. It is clearly an attempt to fight Nintendo’s Wii on price to gain more market share in Japan.

These recent price cuts, models with lacking features, upgrades on capacity, more price cuts, and vaporware announcements are really starting to highlight Sony’s inability to figure out what to do. They married themselves to a horrible product life-cycle plan and now they want out, but can’t figure out how to save face. There is no silver bullet for a product that is simply too expensive.

I admire their willingness to keep fighting, but they’re pretty much screwed:

• The backwards compatibility is a requirement not a feature, at least if they plan to continue using the "PS" trademark.
• They can’t get rid of Blu-ray since game developers are already relying on the extra capacity.
• Hard drive size isn’t adding that much to the price, and the Xbox Elite has them beat anyway.
• They tried stripping luxury features like wireless controllers and that model of the console hardly sold at all and they eventually discontinued it.
• If they have great games, it might save the console, but without lots of users, publishers won’t sign on exclusives.
• They’re already bundling games or movies, and it isn’t exactly making sales any stronger.
• And despite have solid titles like MGS4 coming up, popular games like Smash Bros or Mario Party didn’t save Nintendo and we shouldn’t expect one or two games to turn the entire console around. Great games have to be a trend, but it’s impossible now that exclusives are being bled to Microsoft.

When Sony has failed to respond to Microsoft’s price cut, it told me that they aren’t ready to do it. Why? Because lots of people trying to decide between the two consoles made up their mind once Microsoft cut their prices. At that moment, had Sony cut their prices, it would have made a compelling case to save your money and buy a PS3, but they didn’t. Sony’s PS3 production costs, therefore, are still likely too high to justify a real price cut, explaining why they are doing the smoke and mirror price cuts of either gutting core features or upgrading the hard drives and discontinuing models. As in, they want to do a price cut, but it’s too painful still.

What else can Sony do? What can we expect? For one, we should see a true price cut in the next few weeks. Sony has been gutting features and testing new price points, and based on this data, they will introduce a price cut of $50 – $100.

Of course, any kind of cut is a huge loss for Sony and its distributors since all existing inventory (which there is a ton of) instantly takes a huge loss on the margin (probably a loss). But they have no choice — if they fail to meet their holiday sales projections, it will pretty much doom the console as publishers will really start to run for the hills.

I’m not a computer science major, but I’m very familiar with the programmer market: it’s stronger than ever. After the dot-com bust and the huge off-shore-it-to-India scare, there was a wide-spread decline in interest in the computer science degree. And with that, a general pessimism about the long term viability of the programming career. But ultimately, programming is a form of engineering, and it was inevitable that its wages came back up.

Average starting salaries for CS graduates is at its highest levels since the dot-com bubble: $53,051. This only makes sense since there has been a rapid decline in the graduate pool, elevating the demand. Of course, this will probably wane again in the coming years as this current bubble deflates (a sudden, overnight crash is less likely this time) and college freshmen start piling into the major again.

Nevertheless, if you like programming: stick with it. It may be a little turbulent, but as an entry level job it will always pay more than any other non-engineering job (until you enter middle or upper management). Technology is fickle because it is constantly becoming out-dated; you should be prepared to face a career full of rapidly changing standards, including your pay check.

There is a new Zune coming out. This is not a surprise given how much thunder the new iPods have stolen from Microsoft (huh? What’s a Zune again?)

In short, they are the old Zunes in new, slimmer cases. All of the nonsense about a Zune Phone have been officially smashed. That’s right, I want to be the first to say all of those bogus rumors people were latching onto about the magical Future-Zune were FALSE. Microsoft has taken Apple’s beating and came back for seconds. They spent nine months trying to play catch up with Old iPods ™ and Apple backhands them with the iPod Touch only a month before Zune 2.0 comes out.

Ouch.

Microsoft better starting firing their Zune designers because all they’re good at is copying what was in style — last year.

Sprint just rolled out a new device that let’s current subscribers free themselves from a land line. The device, (horribly) named Airave, allows a customer to use a broadband connection to enable VoIP functionality for their Sprint cellular phone.

The idea is that when you are outdoors, you use your regular Sprint plan. However, when you are at home, the phone switches to use the Airave, which also comes with unlimited call time. This means you have full reception no matter where you live (a common complaint, I am sure). Priced at a very competitive $50 for the device and $15/mo for the VoIP service, this bundle has a lot of potential. If it took an extra step to integrate with existing VoIP phones, it would be a home run. But given enough time, I am sure such products will evolve into exactly that.

Aside from the guaranteed awesome indoor reception and the flat rate calling, I like this product because it successfully merges VoIP phones with cell phones in a behind-the-scenes way. From Sprint’s perspective, it is genius: offload the network bandwidth of calls and dump them on the Internet provider — and charge a monthly fee for this privilege. Perhaps the most cunning point is that this service can convert virtually all Sprint customers who have land lines (i.e., steal customers from AT&T) thanks to the price that is very competitive to land line services (I pay $22 a month for my useless landline).

A Russian court ruled that a former executive at AllOfMP3 was not guilty of copyright infringement. After this verdict, it seems the site is ready to re-launch. This puts Russia’s bid into the WTO into murky waters again and will likely cause a whole new media circus.

In the meantime, you can use AllOfMP3’s reincarnate.

I’m always torn on this particular issue. I think AllOfMP3 fills a void that current exists in digital music: DRM free, cheap music. While labels are starting to finally see the light, so long as DRM is the standard, sites like AllOfMP3 will prosper. As for its *really* low prices, that’s another point. Music tends to be very expensive when you buy it in CD form, and a per track price that is dependant on the file size (quality) is very fair.

That said, selling music without paying royalties to the labels is clearly wrong, but I think the issue has always been how much royalties the labels deserve, since AllOfMP3 has always offered to pay (small) royalties. Lastly, while it’s clearly a little shady, it was also legal by Russian copyright law.

What do you think of AllOfMP3’s business practices?

A new report indicates that one in ten employers are looking at an applicant’s social networking profile.

More than 60 percent said the information they see on these profiles will influence what they think about the job candidate, and more importantly, who gets hired and who doesn’t… Employers have a lot of leeway when deciding who they should and should not hire. Unless an applicant is being discriminated against because of race, age, gender, or ethnicity, there is very little the applicant can complain about later on.

I’ve been trying to warn people about this for a long time now. This all goes back to controlling your online image. Everybody goes out once in a while and gets a little plastered, but not everybody proudly displays photographic proof on their profiles.

With social networking becoming increasingly pervasive, it is becoming harder and harder to stay off the grid. That said, whatever part of you is on sites such as Myspace or Facebook needs to be tempered. This raises some scary questions about the future since I think social networks will eventually use an open directory system that centralizes the data in a decentralized distributed grid. When that happens, it will be very hard protecting your identity and image between different sites while still keeping it an accurate reflection of you.

Still, I can’t wait for elections in 2020 when the first of the Myspace kids begin running for president. I just know there will be a scandal around something they posted when they were 18. Accountability for lasts a life time now that the Internet caches everything.

While there is very little visibility into the searches performed on YouTube, Hitwise noticed some things can be inferred about its traffic. For example, they found that searches for “Funny Videos” dropped steadily as searches for “YouTube” grew.

As in, people figured out that funny videos always ended up on You Tube, and thus, there was little purpose in searching on Google for them.

I think this is one of the first real pieces of evidence that shows how YouTube was a good buy for Google. If You Tube was owned by Yahoo, that would be a lot of searches that got gobbled up by a competitor’s site. YouTube is becoming an actual video search engine, at times completely bypassing Google. In short, Google saw an emerging search market on YouTube — now that is some good foresight.

About time. It seems a class action suit is now brewing against the RIAA. I’m not so sure they can win on all of their claims, but they’ve got the main one in there (malicious prosecution).

The development, first reported by p2pnet, hopes to make a class out of those “who were sued or were threatened with sued by Defendants for file-sharing, downloading or other similar activities, who have not actually engaged in actual copyright infringement.”