Sony Planning to Enter Netbook Market
September 15th, 2008 by Joanna Stern
Tonight Sony held an event here in New York City to announce the winners of its My Graphic Splash contest. After Sony (along with MTV The Hills’ star Lauren Conrad) annouced its new colorful and fashion styled VAIO notebooks, we had a few minutes to catch up with both Conrad and some senior Sony executives.
After chatting with Senior vice president of Sony Information Technology Products Mike Abary about the colorful new designs hitting their VAIO CS and NS series, we got to talking about future products.
When we asked if Sony has plans to enter the netbook market, Abary gave us a firm “stay tuned.” He would not reveal anything else about the design, but he added “we are letting the pioneers in the market make the mistakes. Sony has to participate because consumers are our core competency. We have to participate.”
Though Abary wouldn’t talk about timing, we don’t expect to see the Sony netbook before the end of the year.
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September 16th, 2008 at 2:59 am
Cool comment. “We are letting the pioneers in the market make the mistakes” basically means that SONY doesn’t want to be a pioneer, doesn’t want take any risk and follows a Me-too strategy. Not the first time they are following a trend… I doubt that a SONY netbook will be able to compete with the current netbooks in terms of price-performance ratio. It will be for sure too expensive and contain a lot of proprietary crapware… I’ll pass.
September 16th, 2008 at 6:26 am
i doubt it will be cheap enough to dent acer/eee’s crown - even the dell mininote 9 is too expensive and under spec’d
September 16th, 2008 at 10:11 am
Sony is smart by waiting to se thei mistakes of it’s competitors then creating their product around eliminating those cxoncerns and addiing on some bonuses for us.
The Individual, calm Hill - author of wwalking in the Footsteps of God
http://www.calmhill.com
September 16th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
let’s face it here…the “netbook” is a fad that will soon pass (can’t wait!)
what we really want (and need) is a micro-notebook, not some pretty little “toy”.
Sony knows this, and they are very wise to let the other bottom feeders fight for the playground set. Size (as in small) is nice and important to certain professional or home users, but size is NOT everything. A tiny piece of crap is still just a piece of crap. I have total confidence that any “netbook” built by Sony wouldn’t be a piece of crap at all.
September 17th, 2008 at 7:09 pm
what is a micro-notebook? Hmm..maybe a netbook! Sony already defined this space of portable laptops when they debuted the Sony picturebook. Remember that 8.9″ notebook with the old school crusoe chip?
Sonys problem isn’t innovation it’s there timing!
September 18th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Using an Acer Aspire One for work (and for typing this) means I don’t have to lug around a heavier, bulkier laptop. I don’t lose much in the way of flexibility and processing power (the Aspire runs Office 2003, Sibelius or Quickbooks without any problem whatsoever and has a 120GB HD), and if I need a DVD player/reader, I have a very small/light Samsung drive powered by USB only that serves my purposes well.
Sony will discover soon enough that an expensive, bloatware-infested (the typical Sony configuration) netbook will not survive long in the current market. The Aspire One is $350 and even the newly announced Asus 10″ netbook will have to provide some compelling specs to make me consider switching. Styling is a nice feature but not sufficient in itself to pay a premium in this economy and market niche.