Sony used to rule the world in personal electronics. We all remember that (if you don’t, you’re too young to read this site, sonny). In the digital audio world, though, they’ve been a complete also-ran, if even that. The reason, say some, is their holdings in entertainment: the music industry folks at Sony won’t let them release something simple and good like an iPod because they fear digital audio and buy into the music industry’s line that it’s downloading, not crappy artists, that are destroying the label system.

Consequently, they keep trying to sell consumers on devices that play only Sony’s own proprietary format, and that impose DRM restrictions on music you already own (i.e., you rip your CD to play on your Sony device, and there’s a limit to what you can do with that digital file; no such limit exists with virtually any other music format as long as we’re talking about music you rip yourself from CDs).

Now, if we looked at Sony’s bottom line and saw that the entertainment lines of business were contributing some huge chunk to Sony’s net profits, this could conceivably make sense (well, maybe not; it’s probably better to make no digital player at all than to make one as widely ridiculed as their efforts have been). But that’s not the case: Sony Electronics is the 500-pound gorilla on the balance sheet, so by rights they ought to be working their Walkman-era magic on the whole market space. But they’re not. And it’s not changing, either. (More here and here.)

I don’t understand what drives firms with a history of good products to suddenly create unrepentantly half-ass products, but it’s certainly bewildering (see also Motorola; Nokia came on the scene with a dramatically better product when the world was shifting to digital cell phones in the late 90s, and Motorola has done essentially nothing to counter the Finns’ momentum. A V60 is within a rounding error of a mid-nineties flip-phone in terms of user experience, for crying out loud, and it shows in Motorola’s dwindling market share.)