What kind of laptop would James Bond have if he could choose?
- 12 Jan 07, 12:25 AM
Forget the snazzy bathing shorts, the new James Bond is a bit of a geek. He’s got Sony Vaio, a Sony camera, a SonyEricsson phone and a Sony GPS. Are you seeing a pattern here? Ah yes, the film was made by Sony. And shot on Sony cinecameras. Now what Sony’s doing with the new Bond movie is more than just product placement. The film is an illustration of the company’s entire corporate strategy. It’s called VERTICAL INTEGRATION. And like 007 himself, it’s a bit of a blast from the past.
Vertical Integration is when you try to do everything in the business value chain - from soup to nuts as they say here in Las Vegas. When Howard Stringer took over the ailing Sony, in 05, he bet the entire company on making the three divisions work together: entertainment, games and electronics. And from the look of things on the Sony stand at CES it is happening...
...In the good old days Bond’s main gadget was a Walther PPK and Sony just made radios. Now computing has muscled in on electronics and changed the whole game. Sony’s venerable business model – high-spec gadgets at a premium price – is under threat. Globally the price of gadgets is falling - because of commoditisation: things get easier to make; the magic dust in the patent harder to protect, and whole swathes of gadgets become transparent (or as the man on the Canon camera stall said to me: there is no profit in it for the retailer - 899 is 899 everywhere).
But Sony’s whole strategy is to buck that trend - hence the Film to Memory Chip empire that Sony is building.
All very well if you want to live your life in a Sony world…I should add here that I am writing this on a Vaio Z1RMP, use a SonyEricsson p910i for phonecalls, and regularly shoot on a Sony PC110 or a Z1. And I have a digital note-taker - so no-one can exactly accuse me of having a grudge against them. (The only reason I use an Olympus Mu 700 camera is because it is weatherproof).
But why should I buy a Sony SLR camera, when I can buy one from a company that’s been making them for decades? And why doesn’t my iPod fit into the Sony world?
Critics of vertical integration say it can lead to companies like Sony using their muscle to win market share, not innovation…but when I spoke to their man on the stand, Rick Clancy, he insisted otherwise: it was innovation he said that had allowed Sony to hike the average price of its TVs last year, while the rest of the industry's were dropping.
In fact all the big battles in the electronics industry are being fought out as a kind of empire building…Apple has the iPod, iTunes, the Mac computer and now the iPhone and the iTV…And Microsoft has Windows, the Xbox, the Zune, stuff that goes in your Aston Martin.
Take the well known example of Blu-Ray versus HD-DVD. If one of these technologies turns out to be the betamax of the 2000s, and you've bought the wrong one, you're the loser. But Microsoft and Sony are already using their games consoles to fight a battle for market share with these two incompatible disc formats.
There are massive stakes involved – because the mass market for intelligent devices is emerging very fast.
Microsoft – used to dominance in the world of the PC – has had to join the club of vertical integrators: its Zune music player directly competes with Sony’s Walkman phones and the Apple iPod by tying you in to a particular service.
Microsoft's Mike Sievert told me they thought both strategies could work: vertical integration with Zune - but the traditional Microsoft OS model with Vista. They have signed up 1.5 million devices to Vista and I can now see Vista finally persuading me to put a computer under my telly to run my stuff - had I not already just bought a Denon sound system that plays DVDs and has an iPod dock.
If Vista does what Microsoft wants, there’ll be computer at the heart of every living room – so Windows becomes the platform for everything else you own…THat's a very "computer" way of fighiting for domination, just as Sony's strategy is rooted in corporate DNA that goes back to the days of transitor radios.
Some technology people think all this empire building is as old fashioned as Bond himself : I met one of them at a Martini-strewn event for journalists at CES. Mena Trott runs SIx Apart - the number one independent blogging company – and she’s just done a deal that puts her software on every Nokia smarphone. (Incidentally her Moveable Type platform is what the ±«Óãtv uses to run its blogs). She thinks the internet generation won’t stand for any company attempting world domination and, like me, she wonders why she has to carry loads of different power cables everywhere when, theoretically everything could be powered off USB.
But that's a very Silicon Valley way of thinking, and when it comes to gadgets both Redmond and Tokyo have to think like the 300lb gorillas they are, just to survive.
By the end of this decade the world market for gadgets, computers and software will top one trillion dollars – and the world economy is 43 trillion. The stakes in this game of global domination could not be higher – and as for the players, they’re already down to a handful.
As for Bond – who famously used (the Italian model was the iPod of guns in the 1950s) – why can’t he choose his own technology? If he wants to swap his Sony Vaio for an Apple or a Dell – why shouldn’t he. After all, he is Bond!
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It is happening, but be fair, it hasn't gone unnoticed and people dislike having brands shoved down their throats like Casino Royale managed to do.
Does everyone forget the Lucky Strike/Beverley Hills Cop fiasco?
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The question will be whether vertical integration will mean people having to choose whether they are going to live in a MAC world or a MS world or a Sony world - which would win...? For me at the moment i would probably say Mac but there are always going to be integration problems no matter how loyal you are to one particular firm or technology...
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As much as I admire Apple, I am and very much in the Sony and MS camp. My W810i syncs well with XP. Sony are great innovators and some of their products are very good, some are a bit pricey, but some are not too bad. It was a shame that Sony took the route they did in the early days of MP3 players. They did their own thing, whilst MP3 was the format that everybody went for. But they learnt from that mistake and I wonder where they'd be if they headed the MP3 player charge.
Apple notebooks look good, but then again there are many PC notebooks that aren't bad looking. I don't have a problem with MS, if it works and the price is right, why not.
James Bond would have chosen a Sony notebook. That battery would come handy in certain situations.
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Interoperability is the key
Why buy into a (just) sony/apple/MS world when what we want is for everything to work seamlessly together.
Why should Itunes songs not work with other music players?
I thought the whole point of standards in the Electronic and It industry was to allow gadgets and devices to talk to each other and not lock us the consumer out of the experiences that we want and should have..
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Arent there rules in the industry for product placement??
Its blatently wrong!
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Anti-Sony fan here.
Used to be totally opposite - die hard Sony-till-I-die supporter. But aggressive business practices (Lik-Sang anyone?), poor products (Vaio laptop overheating, other products failing suspiciously just after the warranty expires) a ridiculous PS3 price, and worst of all, DRM to rival or surpass even Microsoft and Apple combined have made me realise just how much of a bad company Sony are.
That said Paul - when you were talking to the Canon rep - any new info about a replacement for the 5D or 1Ds Mk II? :-) Please?!
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I work in the electronics industry in Taiwan. All the Apple products are made out here in Taiwan and China under contract by large manufacturers such as Inventec, Quanta, Foxconn. One of these suppliers will be making the iPhone. They are a one stop shop for Apple, Dell, HP. Even Sony uses them for it's computer manufacturing now.
Foxconn is the fastest growing manufacturer in the world, why? Because it vertically integrates all the components in the supply chain in enormous 100,000 employee plus industrial complexes in China. If there is a technology it has to buy in from outside it simply buys the company! So vertical integration is well and truly established already.
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I expect that Bond would either buy a MacBook of his own or swipe one from a bad guy if he could; his bosses would insist on Microsoft, 'cos the UK runs on them despite their reliability problems.
Bond needs something durable, reliable, virus-free and almost unhackable.
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This attitude - ours-is-best-we-do-everything in order to get as much revenue as possible - has been tested to destruction in the IT industry over two decades. It doesn't work. It's why Apple is so much smaller than Microsoft. It's why DEC, once the world's second biggest IT company, no longer exists.
The companies that prosper will, like Microsoft in its earlier years, be the ones who specialise and make their stuff interoperate (even if badly) with everything else. You read it here first, plan your share strategy now.
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Bond will be issued a government decreed laptop - i.e. a Windows driven laptop. However, as an international spy, he must know all computer operating systems, so will be quite familiar with the Apple Mac as well. He won't care if Sony or Toshiba or Whoever has made the computer or other device he is breaking in to - only that he can break into it. I am no Bond, but as part of my work, I need to know all computer systems. If I can, I'm sure Bond can!
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I'm a Mac fan but I agree completely with Alex Swanson; the consumer needs to demand inter-operability or else we will end up with poor quality goods/service.
In my experience this is always the case when you are tied into one company or one company dominates the market.
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I'm in a love-hate relationship with Sony. I wouldn't be seen dead with an iPod, so I bought a Sony Walkman mp3 player. Now, it has the best quality of any mp3 player i've ever heard by a long way. How does it do it? It locks you into it's abysmal Windows-only software and proprietary media format (ATRAC). As a Linux user, this is less than ideal.
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Whatever system you use, I suggest you run spellcheck on your copy before publishing...
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Geoff beat me to it... the only gadget Paul seems not to possess is a spelling/grammar checker.
Perhaps it is a reflection of the reliance on gadgetry that it took thirteen comments before someone brought the matter up.
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My Motorola phone talks to my Sony laptop (via cable or bluetooth), which in turn communicates with my dell desktop, sharing seamlessly with colleagues' MAC media PC's, and all three share with my canon camera. I can pop the memory card into my Belkin digi-box to view the media i have stored and play it on my Bang and Olufsen TV set.. Would it then be churlish to add that my TI calculator plugs into either computer?
Oh, I don't have my own media player, but do quite happily upload music to either an iRiver or an iPod whenever i borrow such a device from friends.
I also have a third party TV sender that transfers video from any VGA feed to my telly.
Damn, i wish platforms were cross compatible... oh, wait, they are....
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Surely Sony is a conglomerate because conglomerates are still fashionable in the Far East? It isn't engaged in empire building for the slightly fatuous reason that it's been an empire for at least the past thirty years.
Their share price has under performed in recent years not because they are a conglomerate, but because they missed out through not having first mover advantage in the shift away from CRTs to LCDs. In fact, being a conglomerate helped them to weather this storm better than they would otherwise have done!
If you were at CES then you will know that they are now in a position to seize first mover advantage in the shift from LCD to OLED displays. Perhaps in three years time we will again be presented with technology journalists telling us that Sony is "only" a TV company....
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"the internet generation won’t stand for any company attempting world domination "
I'm sorry, but it's the internet generation who are doing just that, standing ignorant on the sidelines cheering while Google takes the one piece that will make all your devices useless - the data...
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As in post 15, the more educated a user becomes, the more interoperable the systems appear...
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While of course the major companies are trying to fill every gap in the digital lifestype, it must be said that either through native support or enterprising 3rd parties the integration of different companies products is getting better and more seamless each year as well.
My Apple MacBook Pro synchronises _seamlessly_ with my Sony Ericsson K750 (using Apple's own iSync software, no less), whilst music and photographs are streamed over Wi-Fi from that same machine to an XBox 360 using the marvellous ‘Connect 360’ software.
So of course you can buy into a one-brand world if you like. Right now buying into certain brands (namely Apple) is proving extremely rewarding but it's important to remember that we're not being locked down completely. Yet.
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Apple now runs on Intel chips, base OS is unix and can even run WinXP. I don't think interoperability is an issue anymore nowadays as you can buy adapters for any sort of gadget as well as applications to convert file formats. You will still have the final say where to spend your money, monopoly or not. As for bond, he should have an all in one device made for him, something more manly than an iphone and more robust than a pocketpc.
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Dear BBc;
I want to command the demonstrator of Guinea for the job well done, bravo to you all do not stop, untill your plat is addressed properly.
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Incidentally, I'm told by 'a source' that the Sony Vaio laptops chucked overboard by Daniel Craig in Casino Royale were real Sony Vaio laptops.
Apparently the crew had 4 of them, and there were divers underneath the boat to retrieve the laptops as soon as they broke the surface, whereupon they were dried out ready for re-use ...
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Despite being a fan of Sony's products and it's vertical integration strategy, I fear the competitiveness between XBOX 360 and PlayStation 3 could blind them to the real threat; lack of ingenuity and lateral thinking.
While focusing vertically is all very well for Sony, it's precisely what Microsoft's doing; a BIGGER processor, MORE power, BIGGER cases, HIGHER costs, MORE risks etc etc all in the pursuit of better graphics.
Nintendo, on the other hand, have appeared as a major competitor to both Microsoft and Sony by bringing out the Wii.
The far less powerful machine with less features is less expensive; it's less about graphics and more about playability. Infact it doesnt even play DVDs, yet Sony found it necessary to hugely hike the price of the PS3 because they felt it needed Blue-ray support?!? More people can afford a Wii, more people want to play it and more people are captivated by it and people can on the whole afford to buy more games and peripherals for it.
This is just one example of big business' lack of insight, especially when you consider that, because of the Wii, Sony added an accelerometer to PS3 controllers shortly before release with seemingly no plans for how it would be utilised by developers.
Admittedly, the success of the Wii has only been detrimental to Sony's gaming division, but this is just one example of how, now in an age where people are bored of things getting bigger, faster and more powerful (vertical growth), a little ingenuity (lateral growth) could slay Goliath companies such as Sony and Microsoft.
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Unless Bond decided to buy his own laptop, he'd get whichever of the big manufacturers had given the govt the cheapest price. So chances are it would be a dirt cheap Dell.
But then he'd also be driving a Vectra.
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In my opinion, Bond wouldn't have a 'laptop'. How vulgar, in an age of 'downsizing' what secret agent would want to lug that around?? if i remember rightly he useed a Nokia Communicator to control the zimmer frame (BMW) that he was shafted with (not how he threw that thing off a building and parked it in a shop!!
So nokia communicator was the tool, no laptop in sight. I think bond should have a laptop that is modular, a bit like his famous 'golden gun' or a phone such as the Sony Ericsson P990i could easily accomodate his requirements.
If we want to do some 'dreaming', how about the unit used set-up worm holes in 'The One' staring Jet Li. Those things had retractable screens and fit in the pocket, he coudn't ask for more...ok maybe a lazer or a magnetic zipper-pull.
You can imagine Sean saying "Yesh, yesh...does it come in shilver?"
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My only gripe is being tied into the Memory Stick format - while many other manufacturers have happily adopted SD.
I'd love a new Sony Viao but then I'd be tied into Memory Sticks, I like the Sony Cameras, Memory Sticks again. If I buy a couple of these items then I will be tied into a format offered by only one manufacturer, Sony.
That isn't strictly a bad thing but it does reduce your options - it also causes problems if you want something that Sony doesn't make, like a PDA.
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I used to like Sony products. I didn't mind paying the extra because I thought they were better quality products. 1 hi-fi, 2 TVs, 1 mini-disc, 1 VHS and 2 DiscMans I have all been through and all seem to die after around 1 year. I still have the Hi-Fi which I had to have an expensive repair done because the CD Player packed up.
I have used Microsoft for years and it has given me very few problems and still have a self-build desktop PC running XP.
A couple of months back I took the plunge and got a new MacBook. With the new Intel processors Microsoft and Apple have became a lot more compatible. I have both machines networked and can easily transfer documents etc between the two. Steve Jobs (Apples CEO) is also trying to get rid of DRM in iTunes Music Store meaning songs purchased from iTunes will beable to be played on all players. Office 2007 lets you save in more open formats letting you save documents between open source alternatives much more easily. It is good to see Apple and Microsoft working together more which is definately benefiting the customer, Microsoft will just have to stay on its toes a bit more otherwise Apple will become number one. I think Sony is digging their own grave by closing their business model, such as ATRAC on their portable media players or Sony BMG putting copy protection on PCs. The Sony Ericsson phones are good phones and the PS2 was hugely successful, Sony should stick to these two markets because people have lost faith in all of their other products.
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Just wanted to say that I think Leyton (comment 23) has hit the nail on the head.
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