Every see those courtroom dramas where there’s a beautiful woman’s life on the line and her lawyer (who’s secretly in love with her) is fighting to keep her out of the electric chair? And there’s usually a state prosecutor who has slick back hair and a weasel’s countenance? You know to look at the guy that he’s not going to play fair and, true to his typecasting, he makes a statement which demeans the beautiful defendant and raises “Objection” from the lawyer and horrified mutters from the jury and audience. The facts may be true, but the way they’re presented is sleazy and underhand. We know not to trust him. It’s not fair play. He’s playing dirty. He’s a bad man. He just wants the pretty girl in jail, he’s not interested in justice or fair play. It’s all about the numbers.
Last Thursday, some technology powerhouses were on a panel at a media pow-wow and Sony Head Sir Howard Stringer claimed that Steve Jobs wants a world where only he makes money and further Jobs is a hypocrite for claiming record companies are the greedy ones.
These facts are probably true.
But consider the source.
Stringer’s issue comes not from Jobs’ hypocrisy or for his desires for wealth and power but from his own thwarted dreams. Sony, now famous for deliberately installing a rootkit in their customers computers (though they’re now suing the company they hired to create it) has all but decided that competing in the MP3 player marketspace is simpyly too hard and have come out with an iPod-compatible speaker dock. They’ll still continue to push their proprietary formats through their own fugly designs but it must represent a certain amount of crow-eating to now start to compete with Logitech and Altec -Lansing in this space.
When challenged on his statement, the Sony head made a beep-beep noise as he quickly backed away from his statement.
Sony calling Apple ‘greedy’ is the absolute definition of hypocrisy, simply put the pot calling the kettle black.
Now it’s possible that Sony’s Stringer was involved in some sort of internal struggle where he was identifying Sony’s own avarice as conditional on the market, on competition, on software and music pirates and the price of pork-bellies while decrying Apple’s Jobs because the latter obviously has a “greedy” quality which makes him a bad person, mmmkay?
So, in essence, if Sony were selling the #1 music player of all time, they’d be less greedy.
Does anyone remember the Walkman?