Wednesday highlights and tidbits from the D conference:
Sony CEO Howard Stringer was the hit of the show so far — funny, disarmingly modest, and willing to talk forthrightly about his company’s (many) past mistakes. He says his goal is to move Sony from operating primarily as a hardware producer to thinking of itself more as a software outfit. In Japan, though, the software guys are all the younger generation, and the older generation calls the shots. He’s trying, carefully, to change that culture: “We’re going to transform Sony quite radically in the next 12 months.”
He defended the new Playstation 3’s $500 price tag, saying that the company intends for it to serve as a digital hub: “It’s got more bells and whistles than a 747 cockpit.” (I’m not sure that sounds like a plus to me; today, I’d rather hear that a product is thoughtfully designed to do a few things well.)
He’s also putting his energy behind a new e-book reader that was later demoed here: It’s about the size of a trade paperback, weighs under two pounds, will sell for $2-300, and uses a new “digital ink” technology that’s super clear and uses very little power (but it’s only black and white). Looks like Sony hopes to do for e-books what Apple did for digital music. But it’s unclear that the publishing industry will cooperate by lowering prices the way the record labels did for Steve Jobs. Sony says that the new ebooks will sell for anywhere from “a few dollars” to “$15-20,” which sounds like an awful lot to me.
At the end of Stringer’s talk, Martha Stewart stepped to the question-line mike with a tote bag and, after a deadpan routine pulling out one power cable and battery charger after another — for digital camera, cellphone, laptop, Blackberry and so on — challenged Stringer to find a solution. He admitted that the components division is Sony’s most profitable, then promised that better power management was “on the list of priorities.”
Comcast’s COO Stephen Burke says he supports net neutrality — “Once you start screwing around with things, slowing things down or speeding them up, the consumer will hand you your head.” But he’s leery of legislation mandating net neutrality for fear of late-night lawmaking and unintended consequences.
Yahoo’s Terry Semel offered a pair of justifications for Yahoo’s delivering user information to the Chinese government that it has used to prosecute citizens for dissident behavior. Semel says Yahoo has no choice but to obey the law in countries where it does business, and that by sticking around in China and providing the people there with good information services, Yahoo is helping change China for the better. But in response to Dan Gillmor‘s question about why Yahoo keeps its mail servers inside China (it could run them from somewhere else in order to avoid having to comply with government demands), he also disowned responsibility for Yahoo in China since the operation is now a joint venture with Alibaba, a Chinese company.
I’m afraid Semel wants to have it both ways: Yahoo’s saying, on the one hand, “We’re influential enough to do good in China so we should stay there even if it means we have to compromise,” but then he’s also saying, “We’re not really calling the shots with our Chinese operation any more.” He should get his rationalizations straight.
Semel also claimed that Yahoo had cooperated with Justice Department demands for large amounts of user data in the COPA case because he was helping fight child pornography. (Google fought back against the government’s fishing expedition.) During the Q&A, I pointed out that, no, in fact, COPA has virtually nothing to do with child pornography — it’s about prosecuting publishers for “indecent” content unless they can verify the age of all visitors to their sites.
I asked Semel how he and Yahoo would feel about being prosecuted unless they made sure every single person who viewed a risque photo on Flickr was over 18. I’m afraid he didn’t really answer, except to say that he was satisfied with Yahoo’s actions and didn’t feel the government had asked for anything unreasonable.
Others blogging D: Dan Farber, Eric Savitz, Jason Calacanis, and an official Wall Street Journal blog.
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