thomas fitzgerald.net

Ok, so the year isn’t over yet but I can’t imagine it can possibly get much worse than this. A short while ago, Sony CEO Howard Stringer was quoted as saying that blu-ray was at “Kind of a stalemate” and pretty much everyone set upon this as Sony expecting defeat. Engadget in particular with their usual bout of anti Sony rhetoric. Here’s what Engadget had to say at the time:

“So we wonder, just what does Sony’s boss, and figure-head of the smack-talking Blu-ray Disc Association, have to say about the state of the Blu-ray vs. HD DVD war? It’s a “stalemate,” according to Sir Howard Stringer. He goes on to downplay the winner as nothing more than a matter of prestige while lamenting the lack of a unified standard. “

Then today, another story pops up with Sir Howard pretty much contradicting the first story saying that blu-ray had momentum. Again, Engadget has the story thusly:

“Merely days after Sony’s Howard Stringer was scrutinised for calling the format war a “stalemate,” the exec has apparently decided to tweak his tone a bit. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Stringer was quoted as saying that Blu-ray had “the momentum and the scale” it needed to eventually reign victorious over its rival. “

They have the story as one of their CE-OH no he didn’t articles, basically lambasting him for flip flopping over his stance on blu-ray. At face value this certainly seems to be the case. But the problem is, the original point, that he said the blu-ray / hd-dvd war was at a stalemate wasn’t what he had said at all. It was taken completely out of context. What he was actually talking about was the studios fighting over the format with some going one way and some going the other. Here’s what he actually said….

“I should point out that that is not part of the software battle. I mean, that’s actually in some ways sort of anachronistic. We’re fighting over a packaged goods hardware that will not go on forever, from a classic sense. We have a more expensive version, as Sony tends to, and Toshiba has a cheaper version, which seems to keep getting cheaper. I believe it has slowed down the progress of high definition packaged goods. Oddly, the studios kind of liked it for a while. They were able to leverage one of us against each other. But in the end, it’s counterproductive. We have a sort of stalemate at the moment. As you know, they had fewer studios, but then they paid a lot of money for Paramount. So we have four studios and they have two or three studios.”

In fairness to Engadget they weren’t the only ones to jump all over this, but rather than do a little digging to clarify what was obviously an out of character comment considering the clear and apparent lead blu-ray has over hd-dvd they would rather portray the Sony CEO as a bumbling fool when nothing could be further from the truth. You don’t get a knighthood from the Queen for nothing you know. Just because your publication is online rather than in print shouldn’t mean you can just call it a blog and say whatever the hell you want.

The thing is, I never even questioned the original article because frankly it never even occurred to me that someone would go that far just to paint Sony and Howard Stringer in a bad light. And again, it’s not just Engadget who are guilty of this, the link they have Yahoo News also has the short out of context quote, but Engadget, from their original story it does seem as if they did read the whole interview and then misrepresent it because they say…

“He goes on to downplay the winner as nothing more than a matter of prestige while lamenting the lack of a unified standard. “

So obviously they read the full thing. Absolutely the worst reporting on any (technology) subject all year.