Is everyone going to buy last night’s Apple shares back now?
Nice little correction spotted on Reuters:
MAR. 9 5:05 P.M. ET In a March 8 story about Sony Corp. competing with Apple Computer Inc. in the digital music player market, The Associated Press erroneously reported the starting price for Sony’s new line of Walkman digital music players. The players start at $90 for 256 megabytes of memory, not $130, which is the price of the 512-megabyte version. By comparison, Apple’s Shuffle is priced at $99 for 512 megabytes.
Ah. So $30 more for the Sony version (which may or may not play MP3s; anyone know? Or care?) than the market-dominating version. Seriously, is Sony not a larger company than Apple? Can’t it get access to more volumes and better prices? I continue to be amazed by how this company continues to not get it.
And it puts a slightly different glaze on events like this from the day before: Apple’s share tumbled nearly five per cent yesterday in reaction to the news featuring Sony’s nine new music players.
“Hello, sir. Would you like to buy back those Apple shares you sold last night?”
- These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
- It would be nice if the press release didn't contradict itself within two paragraphs (6 November 2008; score: 46.88%)
- On that 'impending' Apple vs Beatles settlement (14 September 2004; score: 46.69%)
- We call it "the accidents of history": from archive to stock crash (16 September 2008; score: 31.39%)
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March 10th, 2005 at 7:34 pm
What I don’t understand is why anyone would make a stock-related decision based on a Sony portable music player. Sony has been screwing up portable music for over a decade now. They’re “mp3″ (atrac) players have never been successful. There was the whole minidisc fiasco before that. Portable CD players have been a pretty evenly distributed market before that.
The last time Sony did anything impressive with portable music was the original Walkman way way back over twenty years ago. Why do investors keep thinking that Sony is going to get another hit when their business strategy ever since the BetaMax days has clearly worked against them time and time again? I mean, there’s BetaMax, Memory Stick, MiniDisc, Atrac3 players and a whole litany of Sony failures caused by their complete inability to grasp how licensing is supposed to work.
Did anyone really sell their Apple share after the announcement of Sony’s new player? If so, why? Are all stock brokers retarded or just the ones who have been living in cave for last two decades?
March 10th, 2005 at 8:27 pm
I think Betamax is still used quite a bit in television production, so they’ve got their niche for that. Ditto minidiscs in radio production. The consumer market ain’t everything, as Apple can tell you.
I believe the new Sony Shuffles (well, why not?) do play MP3s. Bear in mind that for the extra cost you get an FM tuner and a screen, which is apparently quite slick: I think one side of the body of it is the screen, and it just looks like the body except you then notice letters and numbers moving across it. So there is some value there, if you prefer that to the simplicity of the Shuffle.
Horses for courses, no? I’ve met people that prefer the Network Walkman to the iPod, because it can hold more tracks. ATRAC as opposed to MP3, but there are lots of people out there who don’t care about the format.