When you hear the name Sony it has a certain ring to it.

I personally remeber as a young teenager delivering newspapers on a bike to safe up for Sony’s latest invention.

The walkman.

For the first time it was possible to carry music in the palm of your hand, whereever you wanted to take it.

That was 1983 or something - 25 years ago.

Since then many has changed, but the Sony business model stayed the same.

Concentrate in the development of ONE product and get it as cheap as possible into as many hands as possible and then charge to deliver content.

With SONY-BMG and SONY Pictures, games, merchandize and other gimmicks SONY funneled the cash into the development of always the latest product.

And now SONY made its biggest mistake ever - invest in a “dead prodcut”.

I am talking about Blue-Ray.

As already outlined in my blogpost on DreamStream Blue Ray is dead.

At this place I would like to make a further argument for that.

  • The current “consumption” of red laser DVD’s is an estimated 15,000,000,000 (15 billion) disks.
  • To satisfy that demand 1,000 production facilities located around the world deliver to the market.
  • The production cost of one red laser disk cost less than $0,10. (Fully packaged disks are for sale in Shanghai at $0,50, which are no different from the original - and most likely is)
  • From all existing producers of the production lines only one survived, which has an output of max 20 lines per year.
  • 1bn TV sets are installed world-wide and most of them have a red laser DVD player installed.

Conclusion:

SONY’s decision to go with Blue Ray technology seems irreversable (DreamStream could help on that one) and cost the company billions of dollars in developement. But the very technology SONY wants to advance - laser readable optical storage devices - reinveted itself. What once believed impossible, became possible.

Red Laser can upgrade to multi-layer at no upfront cost which beats Blue Ray at length.

Here is the direct comparrision

RL Red Laser    <<       >> BR Blue Laser (Blue Ray)

DVD sold per year RL 15bn - BR 50m  /300:1
Production cost per disk RL $0.10 - BL $2   /20:1
Investment need  RL $100m - BL $15bn  /150:1

Red Laser wins in every thinkable category.

In further investment decisions this fact has far reaching implications.

My next blog entry will deal with the single biggest opportunity since the invention of laser technology.

  1. The two companies, which hold the key to each technology
  2. hard facts about investment opportunities
  3. Social Networking
  4. Web 3.0
  5. other hot topics

Stay tuned….