To go after the budget laptop market, Sony's enlisted other manufacturers to design a second tier for its Vaio line.
Vaio models will be split into "division one" and "division two" laptops, PC Pro reports. Division one will be the top tier, designed by Sony with the latest technology. Division two will be outsourced to other, unnamed manufacturers, who will use slower processors and other less expensive components.
Ryosuke Akahane, deputy president of Sony Vaio's Business Group, said the lower tier will retain the "taste" and "style" of Vaio, and will still bear Sony's name, and he stressed that the quality of the components won't suffer. Some features found in the top tier will also trickle down, such as the "assist' button that launches the laptop's recovery center.
Obviously Sony's doing this because it wants to sell more laptops, and as the company has admitted before, shooting for the high end wasn't a great idea when netbooks were all the rage and the economy was in the gutter.
But there is an interesting strategy at work here: Akahane said that while the company still values new technology, "at the same time the network service is very important." He's referring to the Playstation Network, Sony's service for games, music and movies. Right now, PSN is primarily console-based, but Sony has said it wants to expand the network beyond the Playstation 3 and PSP. Akahane echoed that sentiment.
"In our case, we have more devices [than Apple] – such as TVs and PlayStation, and also we have to realise the synergy among those products," he said.
I suppose this means Sony will bundle Vaio laptops with some sort of PSN software in the future. That's just a guess, but it seems more likely than Sony blocking PSN from other laptops or hoping and praying people adopt Sony's marketplace on their own.
