No Rock And Roll Fun

THERE MAY BE TROUBLE AHEAD: Or, that'll teach us to post before we do some digging. We predicted trouble ahead for Sony more-or-less on a whim yesterday, and then, having inked our thoughts in public, we read some background on the compay. It turns out that although last Thursday CNET was reporting the corporation as a whole had a made a fishy sounding $444.4m operating profit in the latest quarter, more considered analysis such as from the International Herald Tribune pointed out that the original Sony strategy - buying 'software' (the record label and movie studios) to provide stuff to stimulate sales of the core hardware (Walkmans and DVD players) has been made more or less obsolete by the rapid developments in internet-style distribution; meanwhile, the music arm of Sony managed to lose $86m despite flogging $1153bn worth of product - and clearly they only spent about fifteen quid on that Shakira video (c'mon, the sequence with the wild horses is so poor its hard to believe she's even in a chromakey studio, never mind that she's in the midst of a stallion stampede).