Yeah...that's it...a marketing ploy... - Steven Graff

Enjoy the Viao.
I live and work in Tokyo, in an office replete with ten Viao laptops and without exception the batteries have become useless within a year, our CTS pro spends 60% of his time keeping these things in working order, and not one person would pay for a Viao with money out of their own pocket. They'd rather have a Dell, IBM, Compaq or if it is Japanese a Toshiba. And yep, every one of these people is Japanese.

We're a Sony company and even so, the running joke as to why Viao's are so problematic is... "It's a Sony." If you think Steve Jobs is crazy, you're going to love Idei Nobuyuki's products. He's running a company in which 70% of it's technology products fail to communicate with each other, even if they can share a Sony memory stick. And rather than learn from the Beta-VHS wars they continue to come up with one propriety standard after another, including their own version of Linux (more cynically... Sinux). There is a reason why Japan has not become a world wide player in software development yet an underdeveloped country like India has, and it sure isn't Kanji or two-byte fonts. When you have the pleasure of tinkering around with your new Viao you may be granted enlightenment into why.

You want to talk about marketing ploys? If you are able to get Linux up and stable on your Viao, you can expect all of your peripherals to be useless. The machines are designed to kill functionality if you are not using the original flavor of operating system the machine came with. So the wonderful folks at Sony have ensured you can not use an English OS on a machine purchased in Japan and vice versa without loosing your DVD player or CD-ROM burner, etc. Suhweeeet! :)

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Thursday, July 10 2003 @ 01:39 AM PDT