Obviously, it’s not technology (online commerce is by no means new). Perhaps it’s something else? Like vision?
[print version] How Sony failed to Connect, again | CNET News.com:
Early in 2005, more than a dozen Sony employees from the company’s consumer electronics divisions gathered for an unusual meeting in the tiny Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters of digital media start-up Kinoma.
Kinoma Chief Executive Peter Hoddie, an Apple Computer alumnus, had been put in charge of high-profile Sony software development, including the Connect digital music project. For a company historically averse to using outside technology, this was a significant step.
For more than two hours, the group met in the futon-lined public area of Kinoma’s offices. According to attendees, Hoddie gave a sales pitch, but not much more. When asked for details on the technology they’d be using for Connect, Hoddie declined to provide them, and the meeting turned contentious before breaking up, employees said.
Programmers went to work on the project, intended to be Sony’s answer to Apple’s iTunes. But the tone had been set for a dysfunctional mix of politics, programming and pique that would prove deeply destructive to Sony’s digital music ambitions. Fourteen months later, a disastrous product launch doomed Sony’s latest attempt to catch Apple.
Politics killing a software project? Strike me pink.
from Tim Bray’s ongoing:
Tantek Çelik writes, on the subject of work by Scott Reynen: “Companies take note – on the internet, there will always be smarter, more clever people building on each other’s work than your secret internal committees, your architecture councils, your internal discussion forums — no matter how many supergeniuses you think you may have hired away and locked up with golden shackles in your labs. Either play open or expect your proprietary formats and protocols to be obsolete before they’ve even seen the light of day.”
Worked at one place where we were told never to post in newsgroups or on mailing lists, lest someone learn anything about what we were doing. To this day, no one knows.