Sony storms the future (again)
By
From a Sony Corporation press release:
Mr. Stringer [Sony CEO] focused on the increasingly personalized nature of entertainment and the importance of recognizing and accommodating the needs of the individual while providing choice and convenience in the ways that consumers use Sony products.
From a Sony Corporation website:
We appreciate your interest in the Connect music store, but our store currently only works with Internet Explorer 5.5 and above. You don’t seem to be using that particular browser at the moment, so, unfortunately, we’ll have to part ways until we support the browser you’re currently using or you upgrade to the latest version of Internet Explorer.
References
Anonymous. 2006. Sony Corporation Press Release: "Howard Stringer, Sony Chairman and CEO Presents Sony’s Vision for Entertaining the Future at the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada January 5, 2006." here.
The Sony Corporation website "Connect" here. (I provoked the message above by visiting the Sony site with Firefox.)
Technology Standards and Music Players
Lynne Kiesling As a follow up to my snotty remark about Windows Media Player and IE in my prior post, I found Grant McCracken singing the same tune when trying to access the Sony “Connect” music web site with Firefox….
ha! have you tried Yahoo Launch radio with Firefox? Here’s my fav error message,
Error
Sorry, we do not support Netscape on the Windows platform.
Error Code: 25 – 0
i don’t think sony’s response is that unusual. few big companies do a good job with their websites.
when i send a query/concern via a company’s “contact us” page on its website, i know i’ve got perhaps a 35% chance of getting a response of any kind (including an acknowledgement that the message was received).
and maybe a 5% chance of getting a response that indicates an actual human read and understood my message.
then i call their 800 number to speak with a live humna. if that fails i call their investor relations people.
i am amazed/appalled how inept many companies are when it comes to using the internet to dela with the public/customers.
seeing how they handle emailed queries is one of my “largeness-of-small-things’ data points for assessing how consumer savvy a big company really is.
nowadays, every firm claims to be on top of responding to the smallest things that customers tell them, to the smallest shifts in public atitudes, tastes, sentiments.
yet if they can’t really master this new fangled thing called the internet, then it tells me top management really doesn’t give a shit.
when i deal with investor relations people, they’re V-E-R-Y responsive.
but i make a point to tell them that i wouldn’t call IR with a question had the normal channels used by ordinary customers been effective.
and that this lack of effectiveness tells me a lot more about how the company deals with customers than having my ass kissed by IR.
going back to sony, the company hasn’t had a real hit in consumer electronics in what, 15-20 years? in gaming, it could well get its ass kicked by . . . microsoft. microsoft?
or bring in as CEO a TV guy (the only execs more clueless than broadcast TV guys are telecom execs who are working hard to figure out the technology behind call waiting.)
so is it any wonder that sony would decide not to support all versions of explorer? and give customers who have the wrong version a kiss off/piss off message?
We Notice You’re Not Using Internet Explorer
Michael Giberson In fact-checking myself on Rivers of Babylon (discussed in the continuation of my previous post), I saw in the Wikipedia entry that Sublime covered the tune too. I had just used the Wal-mart.com website to download the Virginia…
Auto, splendid, thanks, we are still chuckling over “telecom execs who are working hard to figure out the technology behind call waiting.” Thanks. Grant
p.s., but if you are right and we have a great pack of american corporations that “do not get the digital proposition” this sets us up for some interesting times. There must be a generation of CEOs who are so badly out of touch that we might see the board insist on a purge, of they themselves were not so characterized. Every morning brings new news of the digital proposition and the way it transforms the economy. Surely, something’s got to give.
Grant McCracken Is Interesting
I suspect that Grant McCracken’s deconstruction of marketing blog, This Blog Sits at the (Intersection of Anthropology and Economics) is filled with rare insight interspersed with some small bits of utter nonsense. But I do not have great confidence in…