Posted by Vince Wadhwani on Jul 13, 2007

The other day Sony released a new version of the PSP. It has a list of changes such as a thinner profile and longer battery life, but aside from video out, Sony neglected to add any features that make it a compelling product for current users. Since this is the first revision of the product in nearly 3 years, I can't help but feel extremely disappointed with the decisions of their marketing department.

If you look at a company like Apple (full disclosure: I worked for Apple between 1998-Y2k) one of the many things they do remarkably well is sell products to existing customers. Sure, they 'bump' the product line with minor revisions just like many other tech companies, but those occur in timespans measured in months not years. Chances are, you haven't seen the last great innovation with the iPhone. Something is going to happen within 12 months that will make every existing iPhone user insanely jealous. Whether that's foreseeable things like 3G and a better camera, or something we haven't thought of is yet to be seen but my bet is on the latter.

By contrast, the PSP form has improved slightly and the battery life *is* better, but we're still stuck with 802.11b. We still don't have a built-in camera or GPS or Solid state disk. We still don't have bluetooth so we can't use it in conjunction with our Sony Ericsson mobile phone. Heck, we still don't have syncing software that's free.

What we have here in total is a failure to take advantage of the existing market. Perhaps it's not wise to refresh your product every 6 months to make everyone insanely jealous, but I can't imagine that it's any more wise to make incremental improvements every 3 years. Watch out Sony, others are gunning for you and they are going to eat your market share for lunch!