AppleInsider StaffApple Computer CEO Steve Jobs offered Nobuyuki Idei, chairman and group CEO of Sony, the chance for Sony to come aboard Apple's ITunes Music Store service, the Nikkei Sangyo Shimbun newspaper is reporting this week.
The offer, which was reportedly made when the two met at the Sony Open golf tournament held in Hawaii this January, would have allowed for joint operation of the service, the newspaper says.
"Jobs is reported to have wanted to bring the Sony brand into the service to maintain a competitive advantage over Microsoft, which launched a beta version of its MSN Music store earlier this week."
Neither company provided comment on the story.
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9 Comments
Sony is the one company with "Not Invented Here" syndrome worse than the Apple of old. I'm not suprised they turned it down. It's always easy to track Sony...just look for the nearest format war.
Sony's CEO blew it big time. This news is going to cause all hell to be raised at their next annual meeting!
Agreed! Sony blew it big time. They have a huge problem in that their music business, hardware business and software business all hate each-other and poor Idei seems to be unable to do anything about it. Maybe Jobs should grab Sony and fix it too.
Jobs should make the offer again.
Such a partnership would be good for both companies. Sony would have to come to terms with their marketplace failure, of course.
Sony had the right approach with their music strategy...
Have a music store and music player that integrates well with each other. What I think wasn't the greatest idea in their strategy was to make any song their software or their music player play is the ATRAC format. All your other songs outside of their program (MP3s, AIFF, WAV, etc) are incompatible and must be encoded into their format. Which I have heard can take awhile if you want to bitrate to be of good quality.
Why force your customers to only be able to play one format on your hardware is beyond me. It just makes it more confusing and difficult on your customers to use.
Even iTunes and the iPod will play MP3, WAV, AIFF, and also AAC files.