From CNet News.com: "Sony and
RealNetworks
will announce Wednesday they will be teaming to bring
streaming
audio and video to Sony's PlayStation 2 gaming system.
"For RealNetworks the agreement is another part of
its beyond the PC strategy, where the company is trying to embed
its software in devices other than PCs.
"Sony will include RealNetwork's RealPlayer and RealJukebox
software
on hard drives that can be added to PlayStation 2 consoles. The
drives are currently available in Japan and are expected to hit
the states this year.
"According to Jai Jaisimha, a director of consumer appliances
at RealNetworks, consumers will be able to view video on demand,
download music to be played off the PlayStation 2 and use the
console as an Internet radio."
Read the entire article
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From Fortune: "It's hardly surprising that e-business
has been hijacked by the accountants.
"After all, CFOs and CIOs, the folks who set and spend
IT budgets, are by nature efficiency mavens. They are
rewarded for their ability to cut time and costs.
"Moreover, they are notoriously inward looking. A
company's convoluted processes are much more real to the average
top executive than the desires and frustrations of distant customers.
So it's a whole lot easier for corporate bureaucrats to understand
how the Web can simplify well-worn business processes than it
is for them to envision dramatically new Web-based services and
customer benefits...
"When e-initiatives do focus on the customer, they
seldom get much further than online selling, order tracking, and
tech support. But B2C should be about exploiting the Net's power
to transform the customer experience and create powerful new customer-centered
business models. The Internet is going to allow revolutionary-thinking
companies to reinvent industries from the customer forward. This
is the real promise of the Net; this is where real profits lie.
"If your company is like most, a thin veneer of 'customers
come first' rhetoric covers a musty old business model that still
treats the customer as the last link in the supply chain. This
was certainly the case in the world's leading music companies.
It took a frontal assault from Napster before BMG, Warner, Universal,
and Sony started thinking about customers. It shouldn't take a
near-death experience to get a company working customer-forward...
"The Net will create hundreds, maybe thousands, of
opportunities to profitably redefine customer expectations --
but only if your company is thinking outside-in and customer-forward.
Any e-business initiative that isn't built atop customer insights
that are both profound and novel will end up as little more than
digitally enhanced reengineering."
Read this entire article
here.
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Perhaps if major broadcast companies were "thinking
outside-in and customer-forward," they'd still be streaming.
The decision to pull down the streams seems to come straight
from the CFO/CIO mode of thinking mentioned in the article.
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