James's Weblog

Sony announced yesterday that they will not release any new CLIÉ handhelds in the U.S. this year:

Sony has divulged that they will not be releasing any new Clie Handhelds products in the coming fall. Sony will be suspending new Clie product development for the US while they reassess the direction of the conventional PDA market.

Sony has issued a press statement in which they announce they are going to reassess the direction of the conventional PDA market and will not introduce any new Clie handheld models in the us this fall.

While certainly significant, I think most web sites have blown this out of proportion a bit:

• It’s only for the U.S.. I expect that Sony will continue releasing new models in Japan.
• It’s only for this year. Palm OS 6/Cobalt will be out late this year, which will be a good time for Sony to get back on the saddle.

I can’t say that I’m surprised by the news; Sony’s poor sense of direction was one of the many reasons why I quit. The writing had been on the wall for a long time, but Sony was too busy not listening to customers to read it.

It’s a good idea for Sony to re-evaluate their PDA plans, to do some soul-searching, and to find themselves. They can’t even figure out what the “CLIÉ” acronym stands for. Originally it meant “Communication, Link, Information, Entertainment.” After a year or two, I guess the Sony heads realized that it made no sense (especially considering that the CLIÉ line had no wireless communication abilities, had few accessories to connect to, and for the most part wasn’t very entertaining), so they changed it to the even more enigmatic “Creativity, Lifestyle, Innovation, Emotion” (or “Create Lifestyle with Innovation and Emotion”, depending on whom you ask). “What happened to the ‘Entertainment’ part?” we wondered, since that was the only part that (should have) made sense. Furthermore, all of the model numbers are prefixed with “PEG–“, which somehow stands for “Personal Entertainment Organizer.” Maybe it’s comprehensible in Japanese.

How did Sony manage to get itself lost like this?

Bad drivers. I’ve already complained about the management and its inability to ask for directions.

Poor steering. What do you expect from a huge, 18-wheeled corporation? The CLIÉ handheld line is stuck; Sony can’t whole-heartedly pursue its original goal for mobile entertainment without intruding into the markets of its PSP and iPod-wanna-be products. Sony can’t whole-heartedly pursue the smartphone market either—one of the last bastions of hope for PDAs—because Sony-Ericsson already is entrenched in the cellphone space. Instead, CLIÉ models are shoehorned into hybrid entertainment/network-communicator/PDA roles. In many respects, they’re good PDAs, but they’re lackluster as music players, gaming devices, and digital cameras. They can’t excel in any single area without competing against other Sony divisions, so they’re instead doomed to well-rounded mediocrity.