Pocket-lint managed to sit down with Sony Ericsson’s acting head of global marketing. Steve Walker, for an interview at CES and it threw up some frank admissions of mistakes made in 2010, but also a claim that 2011 will show Sony Ericsson have learnt from those mistakes.
A little background first; 2010 was the year Sony Ericsson first got into the Android game and it kicked off with the X10, the company’s flagship product for the year. However, the X10 proved to be less successful than Sony Ericsson would have hoped for.
This failing, Walker says, was down to Sony Ericsson not being able to predict what the market would be like in 2010 when the products were first put on the drawing board back in 2008:
It’s important to remember that 2010 was the first year for mass market Android handsets. Yes there had been one or two things out from HTC previously, but when we started to design our 2010 handsets in 2008, nobody really knew the dynamics of the Android smartphone market or even what the smartphone market was going to be.
That’s a fair point, but it is worth pointing out that both HTC and Samsung managed considerable success with Android in 2010. Why not Sony Ericsson?
One of the X10’s biggest problems was the hardware, put simply it wasn’t up to scratch when compared with products from other manufacturers and Sony Ericsson tried to cut the corner in this regard by pursuing a policy of using software updates to compensate for a lack of hardware features. Walker admits that hardware was not the priority in 2010:
We talked a lot about the platform and the software. The hardware was important but the hardware played second fiddle. What we think is different in 2011 is that consumer attention is swinging back to hardware once more. That’s not to say people aren’t focused on software, but that they are a little more in balance now.
If the decision to marginalise hardware was a mistake then the decision to go with an outdated version of Android and the poor update cycle that followed can only be described as a critical failing and the reaction from customers seems to have genuinely surprised Sony Ericsson:
Last year we didn’t anticipate the strength of feeling that consumers would have towards the Android release. And again that was a learning experience of the first year of mass market Android smartphones.
It’s easy to focus on these shortcomings, but more importantly we should focus on the fact that Sony Ericsson is owning up to them and saying that “As we do every year, we’ve taken those learnings and applied them to the new products in the new portfolio. We do think we’ve taken a big step forward for 2011“.
Sony Ericsson have more devices to announce this year of course, the Xperia arc was just the first, but crucially Walker says that these new devices will be launched with lessons learnt from 2010. Rather than burying their head in the sand Sony Ericsson seems to be genuinely trying to get it right this time around. Let’s all hope they do.
Źródło: Sony Ericsson Admits 2010 Mistakes, Says 2011 Will Be Better
Category: Sony Ericsson | Tags: None
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