It's Not Really a Revolution, But Sony is Embracing Open Source

by Sam Dean - Aug. 26, 2009Comments (0)

Sony is a company that has faced many challenges and witnessed a number of disappointments in recent years. At various times, the company has absolutely dominated huge portions of the consumer elecronics market--in televisions, game consoles, portable music players, and more. Now it faces domination in lots of its markets. Many observers feel that the company became unfocused as it spread out to many types of market in the 1990s.

Recently, though, Sony has made a number of notable moves focused on open source. I won't go as far as ZDNet's Dana Blankenhorn and call these moves "a revolution," but they are significant, and in several cases they are smart. As Blankenhorn notes, Howard Stringer, who used to be head of CBS and has been chairman of Sony since 2005, may have something to do with Sony's cultural shifts, but it's the shifts themselves that are really of note.

Here, we recently covered Sony's decision to focus its entire eBook effort, where it is competing with Amazon's Kindle, on an open format called ePub. As we noted, that move could help Sony pick up market share and even win over eBook readers who read on computers and other platforms where ePub is already entrenched.

In this post, we covered Sony Pictures Imageworks' recent delivery of five significant open source filmmaking applications, adding to others that it has already contributed. Sony has also launched an ongoing open source program focused on open source filmmaking applications. In the end, its own tools will become stronger and more diverse through the effort, and its own films will become less expensive to produce.

Dana Blankenhorn also notes that "Sony-Ericsson is apparently taking command of the open source Symbian movement as Nokia retreats from it." Symbian has taken a very long time just to get to beta with a version of its open source smartphone operating system, and Nokia's recent deal with Microsoft where Nokia will adopt Microsoft's Office applications for its smartphones calls into question how truly focused the company is on open source. (There is even talk that Nokia may move away from Symbian altogether, although Nokia officials deny this.) Meanwhile, Sony Ericsson is playing an increasingly big role in The Symbian Foundation's workings, and shows every sign of focusing on open source.

Sony is too large and diversified a company for me to decide that there is an open source revolution going on in it internally. In some of its markets, such as game consoles, open source just isn't much of a factor. But the company is obviously looking into how its various divisions can benefit from and participate in the open source arena, and several of the moves it is making along those lines promise to win the company market share.