Global Geek News Blog

Greetings Readers!

Yesterday, I wrote a post about how CD sales are down and Walmart is reducing the floor space it gives the CD.  Clearly, the fools at Sony don’t agree with my assessment of the CD and its impending death.  Sony has now announced a new CD format, Blu-spec CD.  This format is going to be dead before it even has a chance.

The new format is said to be backwards compatible with current CD players, so you will be able to play the blu-spec CDs in the CD players you already have, but what is the point?  Are people really going to pay the higher cost of a new format when what they have works just fine and can play the same music, often at a better quality than the digital music that many people listen to now?  Sony touts the new Blu-spec CD players will eliminate vibration and therefor make music quality better.  When people are generally satisfied with compressed mp3 quality audio, do we really need something better than existing CD quality?  I don’t think so.

No prices have been announced for the music or the new players, although 60 titles will be available by Christmas.  I certainly don’t expect the prices to be cheap.  Prices for new formats never are.  The new technology will use the same Blue Laser Diode as Blu-ray, so from that alone, you can assume it will be quite expensive, especially when Blu-ray players are still running in the hundreds of dollars.  With consumers moving in mass to digital downloads for their music, spending a large chunk of money on the new format of a dying medium makes no sense.  Somebody needs to relay this message to Sony so that they stop wasting money trying to develop these formats, only to have them die right out of the gate.

While I will always love the CD and listen to it every time I am in my car, with sales down around 23% this quarter, it is not worth investing in a new format when the existing format is quickly dying out to something far more convenient.  Sony would be better off to create their own store to compete with iTunes and others in the digital download space rather than to create a whole new format that is truly unnecessary.

The world is moving to digital downloads Sony, get on board and stop trying to keep the past alive!

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-Jeremy “pcnerd37″ Bray

Greetings Readers!

When I arrived at my Google Reader this morning, I saw a post on the Official Google Blog announcing that the ad deal between Google and Yahoo is off.  The reason?  Government.

Google claims that the deal was attracting too much attention from government officials and they wanted to avoid a drawn out legal battle since they can’t seem to get the feds to back off.  This of course is no surprise as the deal seemed to be attracting a ton of attention from day one.  While I can understand the fears that some had, I think its time to stop worrying about the companies and more about the consumer.

The deal would have been beneficial for both companies and the consumer.  Yahoo would have had better ad targeting, the consumers would see more relevant ads, and Google would have ran off with all the money.  A good deal all around.  Unfortunately, there seem to be some people that are worried about just how big Google is getting.  While I would agree they should probably be monitored from a distance, I have yet to see them do anything truly destructive, and until they do, I think the government should stay back and watch how things play out.

I am most curious to see what this ultimately does to the companies stock prices.  On the first news of the deal falling apart, Yahoo’s stock jumped nearly 5% while Google’s stock is down a little over 1%.  Yahoo says they wish Google would have defended the deal which seems a little strange since their stock skyrocketed on the news that the deal was killed.  I think this is the most interesting part of the entire ordeal, especially since the deal is dead.

Are you happy that the deal didn’t go through?  Who do you think stands to benefit by the deal falling apart?

Only time will tell how this affects the companies, but I still think they would have been better off having gone through with the deal.  I will continue to watch this story as it develops and blog or podcast as needed.

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-Jeremy “pcnerd37″ Bray