. . . continued from Hot News Apple did it with the iPod and the tens of thousands of music titles licensed for sale and download to Apple hardware. As a matter of fact, some of the music you can download to your iPod is licensed from Sony Music. Convergence. Dopey old Sony with all its cool music hardware. Until recently, none of it would play MP3 files! Years passed before Sony woke up to this reality. The Walkman, the Discman, the mini-disc, the NetMD player, proprietary (and slow) Memory Stick storage media and even Palm OS-based Sony Clie PDAs have all graced the store shelves. Of all the hundreds of music player products offered over the years by Sony, only the Walkman and Discman could play commercial music without a lot of fuss and bother. When the NetMD player and the Clie devices hit the market, I thought that Sony would immediately begin tying its huge content resources to them. Convergence. It didn't happen. Dopey Sony. I'm not holding any tag days for Sony. The Playstation is a powerhouse game platform. As a matter of fact, the Playstation is one of the main reasons that Sega couldn't survive the game console wars in the late '90s. And what is the Playstation but a superb combination of Sony's hardware and content genius. Convergence. One time. Hel-lo!

Nobody else is holding tag days for Sony either even though the most recent bottom line report contained a wee bit too much red ink.

Nobody else is holding tag days for Sony either even though the most recent bottom line report contained a wee bit too much red ink. Losses in the electronics business for 2005 are projected at $288 million. Of course it'll all be offset by Sony's huge profits in the insurance and credit card business. Times, like content and the Internet, are changing.

Sony is now completely out of the PDA business. Its Clie devices are now orphaned, relegated to the scrap heap. Of the 25 different PDA devices designed, developed and released since 1999, only the TH55 model really rang the bell. The others were all too gimmicky and many were also much too expensive.

Incoming Sony Chief Executive and Chairman Sir Howard Stringer faces enormous pressure from shareholders to improve Sony's profitability and spin off businesses that don't fit into the new core strategy of fusing gadgets with Sony films, music, and game software. That's because the current mix isn't working. Sony's group operating profits are expected to fall 31%, to $1.05 billion, in the fiscal year ended in March, and its 1.5% overall operating profit margin is something of a joke. Under Stringer, business lines without clear cross-selling potential may have a hard time justifying their place in the Sony pantheon, no matter how much cash they throw off.

But is Sir Howard's job really all that difficult? Maybe not. In fact, it seems his main task should be to figure out why Sony's many R&D groups aren't talking to each other and sharing data—creating obvious synergies and interactive cross-product interfaces—in what appears to be a comparatively easy way to hit the market with absolutely marvelous products. Convergence.

If Sony, under Stringer's stewardship, manages to pull off just one, new synergistic product, look out. The time has come for Sony (and a few other companies which boast similarly disparate but immensely talented and content-rich groups) to stop talking about convergence and start showing us all how good it can be. How about a Sony TV which wirelessly (and automatically) detects music, DVDs and web content on your Vaio computer, providing you (automatically) with a Picture-in-Picture window with a menu accessible through the Sony remote control? Convergence! It's about time, thank you.

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