Sony; making me blue all over again.

Blu-Gay*, or -Ray, whichever... I just read that Sony are delighted, they've sold four times as many Blu-Ray discs these last twelve months as they did in the previous twelve months! Sounds impressive, no? In fact, no. The format launched in Summer 06 and had almost no take-up with customers due to the prohibitively high costs, so the first year or more can be completely ignored when you rate it's sales performance. Realistically it can only be considered as a format since Sony's PS3 came to market. This leaves it with about two years of sales. Quite obviously the second year of a two year sales history is going to be considerably larger, unless we're talking about Franz Ferdinand album sales...

Going deeper into their numbers bullshit, you can attribute a huge amount of the last years sales to Discs that were sold as a bundle with the PS3 itself... Another 1.7 million sales go to Batman: The Dark Knight alone... So if you add the bundle sales, which are probably a few hundred thousand to the Batman ones, you're left with only a couple hundred thousand sales of Discs alone. That's hardly going to set any sales records or get the managers at Sony hard in their pants thinking about all the extra money they've (not) made...

In actual fact there are a whole bunch of completely unrealistic idiotic engineers/designers working at Sony. I'm not going to go into their sometimes absurd hardware decisions, instead I'll just remind you of a few media decisions from their past...

Mini-Disc. Still popular and going strong, a real competitor in the public opinion to Audio Cd's! Hmm... They're still used by a select few, but only for making up compilations or for open air recording. I say it again, "hmm". My point being perfectly illustrated by the complimentary diagram of a mini-disc to the right...

UMD. Universal Mongoloids Disc, to give it my fully considered title, is a nonsensical and absurdly noisy pile of crap. Shouldn't media be as close to silent as possible so you can actually hear what's on it as opposed to the clattering of a cheap mechanism?!?

BETAMAX. We can thank Sony for fucking it up on this one. VHS was actually poorer quality but had lower construction costs. Well done Sony for again pricing a product out of any normal human beings budget. VHS vs Betamax is a fairly similar format war to the Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD one that's only recently been lost by HD-DVD, with the exception that Blu-Ray is VERY much more costly to produce than HD-DVD was... Nice one again Sony, you fuck-tards.

Surely at this point in time, they should have been working on Digital downloadable media instead of a tangible grab-able product that's going to be obsolete before it gets mainstream acceptance?

Whatever way, look hard at Sony, and if you discount the Walkman and some better than average TVs, it's a company with a history of failure. I'm privy to certain sales numbers, and during the late 90's (actually, maybe the early 2000's) every single section of Sony was losing money apart from PlayStation; which kept the rest of the company afloat... Is this a company with their customers in mind? Do they make well balanced beneficial decisions? Does the PS3 look like the George Foreman Grill? No, No and most definitely YES!

* - Apologies for the awful and politically horrific opening joke. I've since punished myself for it by beating myself around the head with a turquise sex toy.