Sony Learns to Open Up with a Google Android-Based Walkman

Sony, once the king of personal technology, has spent years wandering through the desert, looking for a hit. Sony Chairman and CEO Howard Stringer attributes this to the company’s continued fixation with proprietary lock-in:

Sony hasn’t taken open technology very seriously in the past. Its CONNECT music download service was a failure. It was based on OpenMG, a proprietary digital rights management (DRM) technology. At the time, we thought we would make more money that way than with open technology, because we could manage the customers and their downloads…