How Sony failed to Connect -- again

Early in 2005, more than a dozen Sony employees from the company's consumer electronics divisions gathered for an unusual meeting in the tiny Palo Alto, California headquarters of digital media start-up Kinoma.

Kinoma chief executive Peter Hoddie, an Apple alumnus, had been put in charge of high-profile Sony software development, including the Connect digital music project. For a company historically averse to using outside technology, this was a significant step.

For more than two hours, the group met in the futon-lined public area of Kinoma's offices. According to attendees, Hoddie gave a sales pitch, but not much more. When asked for details on the technology they'd be using for Connect, Hoddie declined to provide them, and the meeting turned contentious before breaking up, employees said.

Programmers went to work on the project, intended to be Sony's answer to Apple's iTunes. But the tone had been set for a dysfunctional mix of politics, programming and pique that would prove deeply destructive to Sony's digital music ambitions. Fourteen months later, a disastrous product launch doomed Sony's latest attempt to catch Apple.

"There were a lot of problems with Connect, but there were some things that could have gone right," said one Sony employee familiar with the project's history, who like most of the insiders interviewed for this story, asked to remain anonymous. "The software was on a trajectory to be okay. But that got wiped out."

The effects continue to resonate inside Sony. On Tuesday, CEO Howard Stringer informed the company that Phil Wiser, a Connect champion inside Sony and chief technology officer for Sony of America, would be leaving effective 2 June, sources close to the company said.

A Sony representative declined to comment for this story, or to provide Sony executives to discuss the company's music business. Hoddie also declined comment.

The effort to reel in iTunes opened the door to Sony's ultimately unsuccessful flirtation with another company's technology -- a relationship that's continued in Kinoma's oversight of Sony's highly touted eBook Reader project.

Why did the electronics giant turn so uncharacteristically to an outsider for technology so critical to its future?

Past and present insiders at Sony say Apple's meteoric rise in music has left top Sony executives with both respect and envy for Apple's products, even while they resist becoming dependent on Microsoft's digital music technology.

Kinoma and Hoddie appealed to their envy of Apple and their aversion to Microsoft.

From QuickTime's creation to Sony's secret weapon
Hoddie is far from a household name. But he's well known in digital media circles.

Before striking out on his own, Hoddie spent ten years at Apple, serving as team leader and chief architect of the company's early QuickTime multimedia software project. People who worked at Apple during that time say much of the early code was Hoddie's, and in the days before it was ported to the Windows platform in 1994, he was one of the only people at Apple to have a full picture of the software's code base.

"He was an absolutely brilliant individual, and one of the great treasures of Apple," said Jonathan Hirshon, a technology marketing consultant who served as a technology evangelist on Apple's QuickTime team.

In early 2000, Hoddie created Generic Media, a streaming media company that included Sony among its investors. In 2002, that was succeeded by another multimedia software company, Kinoma, founded with two former Apple colleagues.

Kinoma's announced products today are a digital media player, a photo album and a media manager aimed at people who use media on portable devices, particularly Palm-based handhelds and Sony's PlayStation Portable. Kinoma consults for outside companies and has worked with Sony on smaller projects.

But its crown jewel is a code base called FSK, a new system for handling multimedia files as they're transferred online, to PCs and between handheld devices.

Hoddie's history at Apple made him appealing to Sony executives who felt Steve Jobs stole a digital music crown that was rightfully theirs. By early 2005, he could demonstrate prototype digital music software dubbed KTunes, which was based on FSK. It seemed to provide a way to jump-start Sony's own digital music effort.

But the project, said one high-level Sony insider, was an "unmitigated disaster".

FSK was not a mature technology, according to critics, and lacked most of the documentation sought by Sony programmers working with the system. It wasn't designed to integrate with Sony's existing Web or commerce systems, and wasn't based on the HTML or XML standards used by traditional Internet applications, so it required significant work to build almost any feature.