Sony absolutely couldve continued to own the portable media player market.
They decided to use smaller, more expensive storage, with no discernible reason to choose their players over existing ones that used standard storage like SD cards.
I worked for an electronics retailler around the time that the iPod came out (our store didnt sell Apple products at all) but it was obvious that Sony would burn out their loyal customer base just from the number of people we had coming in complaining about their memory costing 2-3x for the exact same storage size.
People got turned off the brand due to bad experiences
Totally. They had a string of bad decisions when it came to the overall experience, the network walkman with loading the songs from usb was a nightmare too, hardware quality also degraded over time.
I've been reminded of these when I has to sync to my computer to load arbitrary mp3 in the iOS library. The tracks are on a NAS, I could get them through dropbox as well, or any other way, really. But I have to go through iTunes if I want to add it to the library and listem to them through the main music player (and since at the start every app duplicating existing fonctionnality were refused, there's just no compelling, high quality alternative player not relying on the song library)
This is a single bit of annoyance, but then you still have to juggle with the libraries' respective itunes accounts, getting your tracks randomly deleted while syncing to a new computer etc.
It's still somewhat better than what I had to deal with when I was using a Sony MD with digital tracks. But for comparison I don't have these music related pbs on android.
They decided to use smaller, more expensive storage, with no discernible reason to choose their players over existing ones that used standard storage like SD cards.
I worked for an electronics retailler around the time that the iPod came out (our store didnt sell Apple products at all) but it was obvious that Sony would burn out their loyal customer base just from the number of people we had coming in complaining about their memory costing 2-3x for the exact same storage size.
People got turned off the brand due to bad experiences