High prices hurt sales, Sony admits

Last year, Sony’s IT products vice president Mike Abary made a comment that must make him shudder in retrospect.

“If Asus starts to do well, we are all in trouble. That’s just a race to the bottom,” he said to CNet, referring to Asus’ line of cheap Eee PC netbooks.

Now, Sony has conceded that the netbook market can’t be ignored, releasing one of its own. And Abary, in an interview with Laptop Magazine, admits that Sony’s high price points have hurt the company.

“I’ll acknowledge we have had those issues across the board on all of our products and there has been a paradigm shift in the marketplace that has rendered Sony products to be seconded [sic]  guessed in terms of its competitiveness by consumers,” Abary said. Nonetheless, he defended the $500 price tag of Sony’s Vaio W netbook, saying the company doesn’t have to abandon its high-end position to stay competitive.

To interviewer Mark Spoonauer’s credit, he didn’t relent in questioning Abary, grilling him on the Vaio W’s three-cell battery (Abary said Sony is working to rectify that) and whether a tiny computer really needs a high-definition screen (Abary said it makes the image crisper, even if people aren’t using the computer primarily for movies. This is Sony’s claims that the Vaio W is entertainment-centric).

This part of the interview perfectly illustrates Sony’s confused approach in this economy, not just to computers, but to other entertainment devices such as the Playstation 3. The company wants to create high-end products, but it can’t convince people that the extra money is well-spent. Concessions are made, but they’re not enough.

A potential selling point for Sony, as Spoonauer notes, would be integration between all kinds of Sony products, tying them together with the company’s Xross Media Bar and the Playstation Network. But Sony isn’t there yet, and when they finally arrive, I have a feeling the competition — namely Microsoft and Apple — will be waiting.