Sony’s iPod “killer” really only killed one entity: Sony. There initial release of a hard drive based music player sent ripples of disappointment in the technology world. Not disappointment because it was a bad player in itself, but because it was a failure in comparison to Sony’s rich stereophonic history. The player lacked the features that were needed to woe iPod consumers to it. One huge feature Sony just completely went south on was the ability to play MP3’s! Sorry Sony, not everyone uses ATRAC 3 as their main choice of music compression like you do.

No, the Memory Stick of music codec’s couldn’t be forced down music lovers throats, so in round two, Sony released a new player that did play Mp3’s. While many in the industry applauded the action, Apple was busy prepping their latest hot-cakes invention, the iPod shuffle. Sales of Sony’s iPod killer continued to disappoint and the world population of iPod’s continued to grow as quickly as the human populous of China has.

So what is an Audio Empire to do? ‘We invented the Walkman for crying out loud!’ Yes, Sony did and they will use an old American motto as their inspiration and try one more time with the release of another music player. Sony President Kunitake Ando told the Register last week, “We have put in place a very aggressive plan to become number one again,” and hopefully, for them, that plan includes a better and more feature rich player. But features alone isn’t what has made the iPod so successful. No, it has been Apples trademark that has: simplicity. It looks like Ando-san understands this and he knows that Sony must, “develop software that makes use of our products more intuitive and simple”. But if Sony misses for a third time with the release of their next tape-less Walkman, then it won’t be the charm.