Everybody is citing PaidContent about a story that Sony is closing its Connect service, which was launched as one of the only other services which actually mimicked iTunes to the extent of having its own download manager which doubles as an online store.
Sony has since corrected this notion saying that instead of closing it, it is de-emphasizing it and moving new activity to the PlayStation service, and the PS3 networking site, which has to muscle up to compete more effectively with Xbox Live and needs to offer not just music, but online video and of course games as well.
The Connect service was still operating this week and Sony concedes that 20 people (out of 90) are being cut from the service and that many of its managers are being moved internally at Sony. Just how many people it takes to run a service like its downloadable eBooks for the Sony reader (a lovely product) we’re not sure, but some coverage suggests that the business is transmuting into just books.
The Sonic Stage software that drove the Connect service was every bit as good as Apple’s iTunes, what we never understood about the launch was how a company like Sony could botch so many of the key marketing steps to launching it. On the day it was launched it didn’t work, an act that stopped thousands of people in their tracks, and although the service was fixed almost immediately, Sony then proceeded to spend not a penny promoting it by contrast with the millions that Apple poured into promotion, and never got its act together in terms of selling access for its legion of portable music products. In the end Apple, starting with a single design and gradually extending and developing that into the iPod franchise, was more than a match for Sony, which found itself supporting a line of around 200 different portable music players around the world with almost none of them profitable.
What it needs to do now is create more around the PSP, offering it in other form factors and styles and making it the de facto Sony portable device, accessed via a PlayStation or a PC. We’re still not sure that Sony’s done enough to prune its portable device portfolio and there are so few statements about its online strategy that you may be excused for thinking that it still doesn’t have one.