Sony Walkman Quotes

CHOW^TM contained spun, plaited, and woven protein molecules, capped and coded, carefully designed to be ignored by even the most ravenous digestive tract enzymes; no-cal sweeteners; mineral oils replacing vegetable oils; fibrous materials, colorings, and flavorings. The end result was a foodstuff almost indistinguishable from any other except for two things. Firstly, the price, which was slightly higher, and secondly, the nutritional content, which was roughly equivalent to that of a Sony Walkman.

In the 1980s, a few genetic engineering companies began to ask, “What is the biological equivalent of a Sony Walkman?” These

the nutritional content, which was roughly equivalent to that of a Sony Walkman.

Two years of Newtrition investment and research had produced CHOW™. CHOW™ contained spun, plaited, and woven protein molecules, capped and coded, carefully designed to be ignored by even the most ravenous digestive tract enzymes; no-cal sweeteners; mineral oils replacing vegetable oils; fibrous materials, colorings, and flavorings. The end result was a foodstuff almost indistinguishable from any other except for two things. Firstly, the price, which was slightly higher, and secondly the nutritional content, which was roughly equivalent to that of a Sony Walkman. It didn’t matter how much you ate, you lost weight.* Fat people had bought it. Thin people who didn’t want to get fat had bought it. CHOW™ was the ultimate diet food—carefully spun, woven, textured, and pounded to imitate anything, from potatoes to venison, although the chicken sold best. Sable sat back and watched the money roll in. He watched CHOW™ gradually fill the ecological niche that used to be filled by the old, untrademarked food. He followed CHOW™ with SNACKS™—junk food made from real junk. MEALS™ was Sable’s latest brainwave. MEALS™ was CHOW™ with added sugar and fat. The theory was that if you ate enough MEALS™ you would a) get very fat, and b) die of malnutrition.

But Sony couldn’t. It had pioneered portable music with the Walkman, it had a great record company, and it had a long history of making beautiful consumer devices. It had all of the assets to compete with Jobs’s strategy of integration of hardware, software, devices, and content sales. Why did it fail? Partly because it was a company, like AOL Time Warner, that was organized into divisions (that word itself was ominous) with their own bottom lines; the goal of achieving synergy in such companies by prodding the divisions to work together was usually elusive. Jobs did not organize Apple into semiautonomous divisions; he closely controlled all of his teams and pushed them to work as one cohesive and flexible company, with one profit-and-loss bottom line. “We don’t have ‘divisions’ with their own P&L,” said Tim Cook. “We run one P&L for the company.

For all these years I kept my mouth closed so selfish desires would not fall out. And because I remained quiet for so long now my daughter does not hear me. She sits by her fancy swimming pool and hears only her Sony Walkman, her cordless phone, her big, important husband asking her why they have charcoal and no lighter fluid. All these years I kept my true nature hidden, running along like a small shadow so nobody could catch me. And because I moved so secretly now my daughter does not see me. She sees a list of things to buy, her checkbook out of balance, her ashtray sitting crooked on a straight table. And I want to tell her this: We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others.

Unlike those corporations that focused on building a particular brand (e.g. Coca-Cola or Marlboro), or companies that created a wholly new sector by means of some invention (e.g. Edison with the light bulb, Microsoft with its Windows software, Sony with the Walkman, or Apple with the iPod/iPhone/iTunes package), Walmart did something no one had ever thought of before: it packaged a new ideology of cheapness into a brand that was meant to appeal to the financially stressed American working and lower-middle classes.

The technology involved,* given the economics of mass production, would have added no more than a few pounds to the final purchase price, so why would you not add this significant extra?* Any ‘rational’ person would have advised Morita to go with the engineers’ advice, but according to multiple accounts, Morita vetoed the recording button. This defies all conventional economic logic, but it does not defy psycho-logic. Morita thought the presence of a recording function would confuse people about what the new device was for. Was it for dictation? Should I record my vinyl record collection onto cassette? Or should I record live music? In the same way that McDonald’s omitted cutlery from its restaurants to make it obvious how you were supposed to eat its hamburgers, by removing the recording function from Walkmans, Sony produced a product that had a lower range of functionality, but a far greater potential to a change behaviour.

New product (or service) platforms combine various technologies, some of which are new and others that are existing. These product platforms can have many dimensions of change, such as changes in cost, quality, or performance, and can offer dramatically new and unique benefits. Examples of such platform products include the Sony Walkman, which developed a new technology, or the Apple iTunes that legally combined multiple technologies and products to create a blockbuster platform. These product platforms are less risky and cheaper to develop than revolutionary products but with more potential and differentiation than evolutionary advances. Steve Jobs was the master at this, having developed platform products like the iPod, the iPad, and the iPhone.

We had portable music before the iPod, most commonly in the form of the Sony Walkman and Discman (and their competitors), but these devices played only a restricted role in most people’s lives—something you used to entertain yourself while exercising, or in the back seat of a car on a long family road trip. If you stood on a busy city street corner in the early 1990s, you would not see too many people sporting black foam Sony earphones on their way to work. By the early 2000s, however, if you stood on that same street corner, white earbuds would be near ubiquitous. The iPod succeeded not just by selling lots of units, but also by changing the culture surrounding portable music. It became common, especially among younger generations, to allow your iPod to provide a musical backdrop to your entire day—putting the earbuds in as you walk out the door and taking them off only when you couldn’t avoid having to talk to another human.

Larry Ellison: Steve had decided, rather brilliantly, “Why should I compete with Microsoft and bang my head up against the wall when I can compete with Sony instead?” We’d go on these long walks and said, “Who do you want to compete with: Microsoft or Sony? I’ll take Sony every day of the week, because I’m a software company, and Sony is not.” Jon Rubinstein: We knew that someone was going to replace the Walkman. Either we were, or they were.