Sony’s bet was that they could overcome the strategy tax by sheer talent. They could for a while (2 decades ?) but ended up losing when software became a major part of the business.

Software has always been their Achiles heel.

Their laptop where cool but running widows with super custom drivers. Their music players were cool but running weird formats with proprietary interfaces. Anything that needs software intercompatibility has been basically doomed under Sony.

In contrast Apple has decent software and overcomes the strategy tax by canibilizing itself restlessly and letting third parties eat their lunch where they’re not good enough (to a point. Apple still clings at default apps on iOS for instance)

Sony's PlayStation is a popular consumer software platform, showing they’re not completely incapable of providing usable software.

I'd point more towards the competitiveness of the digital music market making their aggressive attempts to lock customers into their own narrowly focused music platform much less appealing. In game consoles, proprietary content is the point; not so much in audio gear.

Playstation is basically embedded software though, and everything that runs on it has been custom made for it (it’s also interesting that it spun from a Nintendo cooperation, which makes it a very special division compared to the others)

In that respect their MD player was also running decent software, it just didn’t talk to anything not Sony produced.

Anecdotally, they also have a joint venture with Docomo that worked on NFC payment solutions that was super successful with genuinely strong software.

On the music market, I think the lockin wasn’t so much an issue (iPods also locked you in to some extent) than Sony’s desktop software being utter garbage.

I actually bought a Net Walkman at that time because I liked the hardware more, and it was hell: I’m not even sure there was any mac support, I might have run a VM for that, and even in a proper windows environment it was still buggy, extremely time consumming to move tacks to the player, yet limited and low quality. I personally think Sony lost to itself, more than the competition coming for Sony.

I literally just had this conversation with a friend. He was interested in the WF-1000RX3 and I thought it was the over-the-ear phones, but it turns out that's their buds; the over-the ears are WH-1000RX3. (I may have those names wrong, they're just so stupid I don't care, but the point is, the only difference between earbuds and massive over-the-ear cans is the 2nd character in an alphanumeric soup)

The worst part, sony manages to screw this up even when they are in the lead. They have a line of Bose QC35 competitor over the ear headphones that legitimately beat Bose (in terms of sound quality; for fit and such, the opinions seem to be 50/50, but pretty much every reddit thread on headphones with active noise canceling within that price range will recommend them), while maintaining the same price. As of today, they are my favorite over the ear headphones that feature noise canceling.

So far, they have 3 generations of those (over the past 5 years iirc). You know what the naming scheme for each generation is?

MDR-1000X (that’s the gen i have and love; heard that the 3rd has some great improvements over the first two as well) -> WH-1000XM2 -> WH-1000XM3

To add an insult to injury, it is literally just one character away from just as poorly named “sony airpods”, which is WF-1000XM3.

At the time Sony owned record companies and, foolishly, thought that they would make more money from IP than hardware. So they crippled their music players.

I had a Sony MP3 player in 2000. It only played atrac files and I had to specially rip and encode my cds to be able to play. The hardware was neat, it was like a thick pencil. But the software was purposely horrible because Sony wanted to not allow mp3s or songs bought outside their ecosystem.

Sony, exept their Playstation division, are terrible at marketing. You can sense there's an old guard there that is clueless about how to market a product in this modern age.