Sony’s stubbornness and the cost of control

From brilliance to blunders.

There was a time when Sony was the name you mentioned when you wanted the best in consumer electronics. From the Walkman to the Trinitron, they didn’t just follow trends, they set them. Their products were a mix of cutting-edge engineering and bold design choices, wrapped in a confidence that made customers believe they were buying into the future. But somewhere along the way, that confidence hardened into something else: stubbornness.

Sony has a long history of making technologically superior products that end up falling short in the market, not because of flaws in the technology itself, but because of business decisions that alienated potential users. The company’s reluctance to adopt universal standards, its insistence on pushing proprietary formats, and its tendency to ignore consumer feedback have all played a role in undermining otherwise excellent products.

It’s not that Sony has lost its ability to innovate. On the contrary, they continue to produce flashes of brilliance, moments when you can see the same DNA that made them an industry leader. But those moments are too often followed by self-sabotage, as corporate decisions stifle the product’s potential or push it into obscurity.

This stubbornness isn’t unique to Sony, plenty of tech companies have been guilty of it. But Sony’s case is striking because the gap between their engineering talent and their market success has been so wide for so long. They’re a company that can design a product good enough to dominate, then tie it down with so many restrictions that it becomes irrelevant.

Over the decades, this approach has cost Sony market share in music players, portable gaming, digital cameras, and even home entertainment, fields they once defined. And perhaps no examples illustrate this more clearly than the company’s graveyard of dead formats.

The ghosts of dead formats

If there’s a single product that perfectly captures Sony’s paradox, it’s the Minidisc. On paper, it was brilliant: a compact, durable, rewritable disc that could hold hours of near-CD-quality audio in a portable form factor. For audiophiles in the late ’90s and early 2000s, it offered a freedom and sound quality unmatched by the clunky cassette tapes it replaced and the fragile CDs that dominated store shelves. Yet, instead of becoming the universal standard for portable music, Minidisc became another casualty of Sony’s proprietary empire-building.

The format’s demise wasn’t caused by poor technology. In fact, Minidisc was far ahead of its time, offering high-quality audio compression, track editing on the fly, and unmatched durability. But Sony, in classic Sony fashion, kept a tight grip on licensing, discouraged third-party hardware, and restricted digital recording through convoluted DRM systems. While the rest of the world was moving toward more open, computer-friendly audio solutions, Sony’s stubbornness made the format increasingly niche.

Minidisc’s fate foreshadowed a broader pattern. Take the Memory Stick, introduced in 1998. It was a sleek, proprietary flash storage format that Sony pushed aggressively across its cameras, laptops, and PlayStation Portable consoles. But it was always more expensive and less compatible than the SD cards that became an industry standard. Rather than embrace SD early, Sony clung to Memory Stick for years, forcing customers into a costly, closed loop, and eventually phasing it out when market resistance became overwhelming.

Then there was the Universal Media Disc (UMD), created for the PlayStation Portable in 2004. Another proprietary optical format, it was capable of holding games and movies, yet hampered by slow load times, fragility, and lack of cross-device use. Consumers quickly realized they were buying content locked to a single portable console, while the rest of the industry was moving toward downloadable content and standard digital formats. The UMD became an expensive dead end.

These cases highlight a truth about Sony’s product strategy: the company has never lacked engineering talent, it has lacked the humility to let its innovations live beyond its walled gardens. The result? Brilliant formats that die young, remembered more as curiosities than as lasting industry standards.

And this isn’t just history. The habit of creating brilliant, proprietary silos instead of joining broader ecosystems continues to affect Sony today. It’s a cycle of innovation followed by isolation, and it’s cost them relevance in several sectors they once dominated.

PlayStation’s declining vision

The PlayStation brand has been one of Sony’s most visible successes, but in recent years it has also become one of the clearest examples of how the company’s design philosophy and business choices can erode long-term goodwill. The early PlayStation generations thrived because they felt fresh, accessible, and developer-friendly. Today, the platform feels like it’s running on prestige alone, while competitors build richer ecosystems.

First, there’s the hardware design problem. Sony has an unfortunate habit of creating consoles that prioritize visual impact over practicality. The PlayStation 5’s oversized, polarizing shell is a perfect example: impressive in marketing photos, awkward in real living rooms, and needlessly bulky in a time when compact efficiency is celebrated. It’s the kind of statement piece that works for a tech expo, but less so for the average gamer’s setup.

Then comes the server infrastructure, which has been the Achilles’ heel of PlayStation’s online experience for years. Lag spikes, unreliable matchmaking, and inconsistent download speeds are common complaints, made worse by the fact that players are paying for the privilege through the PlayStation Plus subscription. In contrast, Microsoft’s Xbox Live has maintained a reputation for stability and smooth performance, building trust with players even when things go wrong.

Backwards compatibility, once a beloved PlayStation feature, has all but disappeared. Older games are often locked behind cloud-streaming services or expensive remasters, leaving players with vast libraries they can’t revisit without extra costs. Microsoft, meanwhile, has leaned hard into backwards compatibility on Xbox, letting users bring forward decades of purchases and play them on modern hardware. It’s not just a feature, it’s a statement of respect for the player’s investment.

The game catalog also reflects a narrowing focus. PlayStation continues to produce blockbuster single-player exclusives, and they do it well, but variety is lacking. Niche genres, experimental titles, and smaller-scale games are overshadowed by cinematic epics that, while technically impressive, begin to blur together. Microsoft’s Game Pass model offers a counterpoint: breadth, diversity, and a sense that every type of player has a reason to subscribe.

In short, PlayStation today feels like a premium product trapped in an outdated mindset, confident enough in its prestige to avoid meaningful change, yet losing ground to a rival that is reshaping what a gaming ecosystem can be.

Innovation by acquisition

In the early days, Sony’s name was synonymous with original engineering breakthroughs. They didn’t just build products, they built entire categories. But in the last decade, a shift has been visible: instead of driving the industry forward with fresh ideas, Sony increasingly relies on acquisitions, licensing deals, and media partnerships to keep the perception of innovation alive.

This isn’t unusual in tech, consolidation is the norm, but for Sony, it feels like a quiet admission that the company no longer sets the pace. While Microsoft pours resources into Xbox Game Studios and Game Pass to expand the player experience, Sony’s biggest moves have often been about buying exclusivity rights or acquiring already-established developers. It’s a safer route, but it doesn’t inspire the same excitement as unveiling a truly groundbreaking product.

Even outside of gaming, the strategy repeats itself. Instead of leading with proprietary hardware innovation that has a real competitive advantage, Sony has leaned on brand recognition and distribution muscle to maintain relevance. The most striking example in recent years is the way they’ve partnered with film studios and streaming services to keep the PlayStation brand visible, without delivering parallel breakthroughs on the console or services side.

This approach works in the short term, acquisitions and exclusives create headlines, and the media plays along, often framing Sony as an innovator when, in reality, they’re curating rather than creating. It’s a smoke-and-mirrors act that can keep shareholders happy, but it doesn’t rebuild the kind of loyalty that comes from true innovation.

The irony is that Sony still has the resources, talent, and infrastructure to lead in multiple sectors. But instead of investing heavily in reinventing the PlayStation experience, modernizing its music ecosystem, or reviving its rich legacy in portable entertainment, the company appears content to play catch-up by purchasing what others have already built. And that’s not the Sony that earned its place in tech history.

Wrapping it up

Sony remains a remarkable company, a brand with a rich legacy of engineering brilliance, cultural influence, and iconic products. But the patterns are hard to ignore: a stubbornness to adapt, a reluctance to embrace industry standards, and a tendency to smother its own innovations under layers of control. The Minidisc wasn’t killed by poor design, but by corporate isolationism. The PlayStation’s struggles aren’t due to a lack of talent, but to decisions that prioritize appearance and exclusivity over user experience.

Meanwhile, competitors like Microsoft have embraced a very different philosophy: ecosystem over ego. Xbox’s backwards compatibility, Game Pass model, and robust online services aren’t just features, they’re commitments to a relationship with players. Sony could take notes, but too often it seems convinced that its name alone is enough to keep the crown.

The tragedy here is that Sony still has the ability to surprise us. The company has the engineers, the creative teams, and the brand power to redefine gaming, music, and entertainment once again. What it lacks is the willingness to step outside its self-imposed walls and engage with the broader industry as a collaborator rather than a gatekeeper.

If Sony continues on its current path, its legacy risks becoming a museum of “what could have been”, shelves lined with brilliant products that died young, platforms that aged poorly, and opportunities squandered in the name of control. In the fast-moving world of tech and entertainment, that’s not just a sad story; it’s a fatal one.

For fans of the brand, the hope remains that somewhere within Sony’s vast corporate structure, someone is willing to say: It’s time to be bold again. Until then, the company will keep walking the fine line between prestige and irrelevance, hoping the past can carry the weight of the future.