Walkman Turns 30, but Sony Struggles

Once the Peak of Innovation, Electronics Co. Tries to Reinvent Itself

(AP)  When the Sony Walkman went on sale 30 years ago, it was shown off by a skateboarder to illustrate how the portable cassette-tape player delivered music on-the-go - a totally innovative idea back in 1979.

Today, Sony Corp. is struggling to reinvent itself and win back its reputation as a pioneer of razzle-dazzle gadgetry once exemplified in the Walkman, which Wednesday had its 30th anniversary marked with a special display at Sony's corporate archives.

The Japanese electronics and entertainment company lost $1.02 billion in the fiscal year ended March - its first annual loss in 14 years - and is expecting more red ink this year.

The manufacturer, which also makes Vaio personal computers and Cyber-shot cameras, hasn't had a decisive hit like the Walkman for years, and has taken a battering in the portable music player market to Apple Inc.'s iPod.

Sony has sold 385 million Walkman machines worldwide in 30 years as it evolved from playing cassettes to compact disks then minidisks - a smaller version of the CD - and finally digital files. Apple has sold more than 210 million iPod machines worldwide in eight years.

There is even some speculation in the Japanese media that Sony should drop the Walkman brand - a name associated with Sony's rise from its humble beginnings in 1946 with just 20 employees to one of the first Japanese companies to successfully go global.

"The Walkman's gap with the iPod has grown so definitive, it would be extremely difficult for Sony to catch up, even if it were to start from scratch to try to boost market share," said Kazuharu Miura, analyst with Daiwa Institute of Research in Tokyo.

Miura believes Sony can hope to be unique with its PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable video game consoles, but it has yet to offer outstanding electronics products that exploit such strengths.

The Nikkei, Japan's top business newspaper, reported recently that Sony set up a team to develop a PSP with cell-phone features. But Miura said the idea was nothing new, since the iPhone, another Apple product, has gaming features, and Sony isn't likely to have such a product soon.

Earlier this year, Sony Chief Executive Howard Stringer announced a new team of executives and promised to bring together the hardware electronics and entertainment content divisions of Sony's sprawling empire - an effort that he said will turn around Sony and restore its profitability.

But Stringer, and his predecessors, have been making that same promise for years.

When the iPod began selling like hotcakes several years ago, a Japanese reporter asked Shizuo Takashino, one of the developers of the original Walkman, why Sony hadn't come up with the idea. Afterall, the iPod seemed like something that should have been a trademark Sony product.

Takashino had been showing reporters the latest Walkman models, which played proprietary files. Sony has been criticized for sticking to such proprietary formats. One major reason for the iPod's massive popularity was that it played MP3 files, which are widely used for online music and compatible with many devices.

In a special display at Tokyo's Sony Archive building, opening Wednesday to commemorate the Walkman's 30-year history, an impassioned Akio Morita, Sony's co-founder, speaks to employees in a 1989 video to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Walkman.

"We can deliver a totally new kind of thrill to people with the Walkman," said the silver-haired Morita, proudly wearing a gray factory-worker jacket and surrounding himself with dozens of colorful Walkman machines. "We must make more and more products like the Walkman."

Morita acknowledges in the video that the Walkman doesn't feature any groundbreaking technology but merely repackaged old ones - but did so in a nifty creative way. And it started with a small simple idea - enjoying music anywhere, without bothering people around you.

The original Walkman was as big as a paperback book, and weighed 390 grams (14 ounces). It wasn't cheap, especially for those days, costing 33,000 yen ($340).

But people snatched it up.

Other names were initially tried for international markets like "soundabout" and "stowaway." Sony soon settled on Walkman. The original logo had little feet on the A's in "WALKMAN."

Many, even within Sony, were skeptical of the idea because earphones back then were associated with unfashionable, hard-of-hearing old people. But Morita was convinced he had a hit.

The archival exhibit shows other Sony products that have been discontinued or lost out to competition over the years - the Betamax video cassette recorder, the Trinitron TV, the Aibo dog-shaped robotic pet.

The Walkman exhibit, which runs through Dec. 25, shows models that are still on sale, some about the size of a lighter that play digital music files.

Also showcased are messages from Morita and his partner Masaru Ibuka, who always insisted a company could never hope to be a winner by imitating rivals but only by dashing stereotypes.

"All we can do is keep going at it, selling our Walkman, one at a time," said Sony spokeswoman Yuki Kobayashi. "Thirty years is a milestone for Sony. But we hope the Walkman won't be seen as just a piece of history."

[barbaram99]

It was music cds if my memory is right that installs theie stuff on the computer if one tried to put in on their computer is what I heard on the news.

[whitemale08]

The greedy thing about it is that the cd existed as a proto-type long before the Walkman went into retail.

Even tiny hard-drive mass storage existed in theory decades before the Walkman but Wall Street/City of London needed Apple and Intel to constantly drag out the evolution of these consumer products.

That was the business model of big monopolies like Sony, to stifle the obvious uses of basic technologies to drain every penny possible from the consumer.

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates should be ashamed of themselves for claiming the i-pod or i-phone is something 'new'.

[veils-2009]

Sony's strict corporate policies to protect its vast library of songs and movies will allow the company to embrace open source codecs and compression techniques like MP3.

Remember this is the company who put secret programs on their DVDs so that when it was played on a PC it would secretly install and hide and run a program that would keep the user from bring able to make back copies of the DVD, even thought all the laws say that this was perfectly okay to do.

[barbaram99]

I had one years ago. I hated it. I was never a fan of cassttes. Ye had turn them over. I don't own an ipod. The thing is I don't like the in yer ear headphones..

[habu99-2009]

In the broadcast industry, we have to deal with Sony products frequently. And as itgranny noted, they march to the beat of their own drum and have to own any "standard" they use that is generally incompatible with whatever the rest of the industry is doing. As such we joke that SONY stands either for "Serving Ourselves, Not You" or "Standards? Ours, Not Yours". They can't seem to grasp that proprietary media, file formats, etc in the long run paint them into a corner. Look at the BetaMax, one of Sony's original proprietary formats. Its picture was far superior to VHS, but you could buy VHS blank tapes from just about anybody, but only Sony sold Beta blanks. They never learn...

[TyroneHoglegg]

Hit the nail on the head!

[itgranny]

delete the "and from what." sorry

[itgranny]

Sony needs to figure out how to learn to stay within the boundrys when they are doing something. The memory stick for their cameras. They get greedy make cameras that don't take any kind of memory other than their memory sticks. I've got a vao computer here who's components have the same sort of trouble and from what . While there's some good ideas behind their stuff, they go just a little too far and noting from the items i've actually worked on, their stuff gets broken down and outdated before others that have leaned more mainstream.

[docpeter1953]

Occasionally they do have a winner, like winning Blu-Ray over HD formatting for discs. But they need to learn to be more fluid with updating their equipment so that, if and when, they lose their format challenges like they did with Beta vs. VHS, and against MP3, and MSP and MSPD vs all the other memory formats, they can still succeed.