OP wasn't saying walkman wasn't cool or have a significant market position, in fact he's saying the exact opposite. That Sony had the position an failed to use it to position new devices. Apple turned the iPod into the iPhone and iPad and now they have AirPods coming off of the same train using each product brand to push the brand of the next.
Sony had the Walkman but missed the mp3-player market, didn't bring out a walkman phone, and now they have a product competing with AirPods that's naturally completely disconnected from the walkman both directly and indirectly because "walkmen are ancient" which is not some universal truth, that's just what they let their previously powerful brand degrade to. They've wisely chosen to brand their Airpod competitor the Sony WF1000XM3, who doesn't want products that sound like version of cruiser missiles, or shipping container dimensions? Ironically I heard a friened describe his pair as his "Sony AirPods", because that's what they are to him, the equivalent of Apple AirPods but cheaper and made by Sony, because even the people who own the product can't remember the name. So naturally friends ask why not get "Real" AirPods? And his answer was price, which makes the product sound like a cheap discount version. But it's in the same price range and same quality and even beat out the AirPods in some reviews. Talk about a branding disaster.
I didn’t understand Sony’s strategy back when the iPod was big and I still don’t now.
At roughly the same time I got an iPod, and an Apple-hating housemate bought a Sony MP3 player with a name only a barcode scanner could love. Also it couldn’t play MP3s, instead a weird proprietary format that didn’t work anywhere else. Songs had to be converted using their crappy software.
He swapped it for an iPod within weeks.
Even now, the conversation is ‘what are those?’, ‘oh, they’re AirPods’. Compared to ‘what are those?’, ‘oh, they’re Sony WC-31... err, Sony headphone things.
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.
He’s saying it should have been named the “Walkman Distance” or some inspiring name that evokes phone and walkman. Not the number that sounds like a container dimension or like the lubricant WD40.
I loved my W800i, it was a revelation to me, although it had no headphone jack but a clunky adaptor, i used it way longer than I needed to.
Simply an outstanding device at the time.
Amusingly the Sony WH-1000XM3 are absolutely superlative noise-cancelling over-the-head headphones. They're really a damned good product. But lots of Sony stuff seems driven by random PMs being good at stuff but not being able to make it part of the culture or something.
As a Sony ex-fanboi: another fail was the painful bare achievement of stated specs. Sure product did X, but did so relying on weird tech stacks, or not X.00001, or cut corners in presumed but not actually stated specs. Result was that when pushed to a reasonable limit, it often either hit a brick wall or fell off a cliff, to painful results.
Variant: UI is all too often painful. Extra steps, easy invocation of dangerous mistakes.
Finally, the sense of abandonment. You bought it, WTF do you think you are - you want updates for years, or compatibility with other devices?
Vs...
Apple doesn't give much re: specs because they're mostly irrelevant in use. UI is nuanced. And everything is built to keep you smoothly progressing deeper into the ecosystem.
This isn't true but maybe that verifies exactly the point you're trying to make. Sony had a whole line of Walkman phones including a Walkman brick phone, a flip phone, and an awesome switchblade-style phone. They were able to sync music to your computer directly, without any software, and stored it all on a Sony memory stick. Unfortunately, they also did not have a standard headphone jack and relied on connecting headphones through the same data/sync port which meant that you had to use and buy the Walkman-branded headphones from Sony.
They were soooo close but a few key decisions made them fail miserably.
"That Sony had the position an failed to use it to position new devices."
But Sony did use its previous products positioning to produce and market new ones. The arguably owned the "portable audio" market from their first transistor radio in 1955, through the Walkman brand dominance up until the first iPod.
They were no longer really able to compete after the key differentiator became software.
Sony had the Walkman but missed the mp3-player market, didn't bring out a walkman phone, and now they have a product competing with AirPods that's naturally completely disconnected from the walkman both directly and indirectly because "walkmen are ancient" which is not some universal truth, that's just what they let their previously powerful brand degrade to. They've wisely chosen to brand their Airpod competitor the Sony WF1000XM3, who doesn't want products that sound like version of cruiser missiles, or shipping container dimensions? Ironically I heard a friened describe his pair as his "Sony AirPods", because that's what they are to him, the equivalent of Apple AirPods but cheaper and made by Sony, because even the people who own the product can't remember the name. So naturally friends ask why not get "Real" AirPods? And his answer was price, which makes the product sound like a cheap discount version. But it's in the same price range and same quality and even beat out the AirPods in some reviews. Talk about a branding disaster.