Lately I have been noticing that Sony just can’t catch a break. The PS3 problems, Exploding batteries and a DVD format war that doesn’t look good are all doing a great deal of damage to the morale, if not the per share price of Sony Corporation. I wonder where all of this bad karma came from?

Could it be their dogged determination to get a proprietary format out into circulation and make money on licencing? Lets take a walk down memory lane and remember fondly how they tried to stick us with closed technology.

Betamax
Betacam
Minidisc
Multi-Media Compact Disc
HiFD
Super Audio Compact Disc
Memory Stick
Memory Stick Pro
Memory Stick Duo
Memory Stick Micro M2
UMD
Blu-Ray

Notice that I added blu-ray? hehehe. What is important to remember is that these are not the only physical media formats that Sony has participated in or helped develop. Sucesses include:

3.25″ floppy
CD
CD-Rom
DVD
Video8
Hi8
DV
MiniDV

Wow. So that is quite a list. The failures are marked by a.) few, if any partners and b.) open, saturated market with cheaper or better products. Some of these are even case studies in why a product won’t be sucessful. The Betamax/VHS war is infamous thoughout marketing circles and is over-simplified often with allustions to the adult industry. The first Memory Stick came into a market with the smaller xd, the cheaper Compact Flash and the ubiquitous Secure Digital.

I just purchased my 4th Sony camera, and the reason for my rant is that I am surprised. There is no Memory Stick port in it at all, as a matter of fact, they included an ADAPTER just in case you would really like to use the Sticks you already have. It is a Compact Flash sized device, with a PRO Duo slot. I was amazed, utterly.

Perhaps in the coming format war, the primary players would do well to remember the folly of the past. When the dust settles, will anyone really want a physical medium? Will the confluence of IPTV, TiVo, and market model like the iTunes Movie store make physical media obsolete? The MySpace generation is getting older, typically doesn’t have a home phone and has uploaded image and video to the internet at least once. It is possible that HD\Blu-DVD/Ray will go the way of the laser disc. Maybe it will just get replaced with a Memory Stick.

This November, the world will change. We saw the buzz from Snakes, and the movie performed well and made its budget easily. It was not intentional marketing that let to the frenzy, but a title. Campy enough to cross the threshold from bad to fun, the movie was exactly what it said it would be…Snakes…on a Plane. How does one generate that buzz for a movie?

If I were a marketeer, I would look at the current mood and decide what hipster modes of communication are co-optable. At this point, major players are MySpace, YouTube, and Paris Hilton. Sacha Baron Cohen, of Ali G fame, is building what will be considered a case-study in how to promote a movie at this point in time.

I have seen clips on YT featuring Borat, and am impressed. It is some funny stuff, if not a bit sensational. Borat is anti-semetic, racist, sexist, and generally horny. He has pissed off all the right people and is getting real media play from it, such as a Nightline feature and a press conference. What is he doing right? Well, for one thing, he is staying in character, on late night talk shows, interviews and a video agreeing that Sacha Cohen should be sued for defamation. There are out-takes from the movie posted on YT as well, and I am stoked. The best use of the media is the press conference in front of the Kazakhstan embassy and offered the premier an invitation to his movie. When he wasn’t admitted he went to the front of the white house and offered it to Warlord, Premier George Walter Bush.