CES: Sony plays up its huge lineup of gear
Just got out of the Sony press conference. I've dashed off some stuff that will appear in tomorrow's CES story but here's a look at what I wrote. — Sony Chairman and chief executive Sir Howard Stringer took the stage at Sony's press conference Sunday night …
Context & Ripple Effects
Sony's Sunday-night CES press conference, led by Chairman and CEO Howard Stringer, is the company's annual bid to be seen as more than a component maker — a breadth-of-lineup display spanning TVs, GPS, and gaming. The story traveled fast: Engadget ran live coverage of the keynote and separately flagged the XEL-1 OLED slipping into US stores, giving Sony a retail first in a display category it has been cultivating.
The backdrop is a high-definition disc market going nowhere fast — reporting at the end of December put combined stand-alone Blu-ray and HD DVD player sales at roughly one million units despite steep price cuts — which makes Sony's push to fill the stage with adjacent categories (new nav-u GPS devices, a rumored Skype deal for the PSP) read as diversification rather than confidence.
First-order effects
- Sony's nav-u launch formally re-enters the car GPS market, putting the company head-to-head with established portable-navigation vendors on features rather than price.
- With the XEL-1 reaching US shelves, Sony gets first-mover bragging rights in OLED televisions while rival flat-panel makers are still shipping LCD and plasma.
Second-order effects
- Toshiba's HD DVD camp faces added pressure: with players cheap and adoption still marginal, every Sony keynote moment spent on Blu-ray-adjacent content and devices narrows the perceived gap between the formats.
- GPS incumbents must now answer a brand entrant with deep retail channels, likely forcing faster feature refresh cycles in portable navigation.
Third-order effects
- Stringer's lineup-first staging points toward Sony's longer integration thesis — one company spanning displays, discs, and handheld gaming — where CES keynotes function as proof-of-breadth for investors as much as product launches.
- If stand-alone high-def disc hardware stays stuck near the million-unit mark, both formats' fates increasingly hinge on built-in drives in consoles and PCs rather than living-room boxes, shifting the format war onto other companies' hardware roadmaps.
The trend: Consumer electronics giants are using CES lineup breadth to stake integration claims during a format transition, with display technology and device categories — not disc formats — becoming the differentiator.