Sony announced very few products at CES 2020
And it was their best showcase, ever
From the perspective of someone who needs to write about shiny new products and film hands-on product videos, Sony CES 2020 was a disaster. Outside of new TVs,
Sony had absolutely no new products on stage, both conceptual or for later in the year to talk about. Rewind just a few years, and Sony would inundate us wearables, headphones, speakers, MP3 players, countless TVs, laptops, sound bars, and so much more. But at CES 2020, Sony only had a handful of products to show, literally, and it was their best CES ever, or at least in the last decade that I’ve been covering the company.
Unlike years prior where Sony talked nonstop about ‘Kondo’ and how they aim to bring emotion to their products and entertain us, with high-level corporate talking points that always fell flat, this year’s keynote, led by CEO Kenichiro Yoshida, was smooth, focused, and relaxed.
Sure, there was still a bit of the corporate parade where NBC Sports CTO came on stage to tout their 5G partnership, but outside of that, there was no film star or musician who was clearly contractually obligated to appear on stage waxing poetic about their affirmation for a Sony product or key technology with their own “personal passion.” Instead, Yoshida, who is visibly more comfortable on stage, walked us through the latest products and key technologies that will be a crucial part of Sony’s future for the next decade to come¹ without an onslaught of visual video porn that got to the point.
And to top it all off, Sony had their own ‘one more thing’ moment where they unveiled the Vision-S concept car. You may have heard about it.
With a more focused keynote came fewer new products to announce, and that’s exactly what Sony needs. One of the biggest problems with CES is an arbitrary timeline that companies, and therefore engineers, must adhere to. By CES, that latest wizbang headphone or sound crushing speaker needs to be ready in demo capacity, and while fun for attendees and content creators, it forces companies to unveil products that might not ship for nine months. It’s not unheard for Sony to have showcased a product at CES that didn’t ship until early summer or fall, and that’s absurd.
Such a vast runway depresses sales of current products on markets, while also frustrating the brand’s core customers who are excited by what’s been unveiled, only to find out that they need to wait more than half a year to be able to get their hands on said product. And that’s assuming they’ll hear about it at all.
With literally thousands of products being showcased at CES, unless you’ve got a surprise car, it’s hard to get news out about what you’ve unveiled. By not unleashing every product they have in their pipeline, Sony can announce them when they’re closer to their release date, knowing that news of them won’t get buried among the sea of other products that are also gasping for attention.
More than ever, Sony appears to be focused at what they now do best — creating key technologies, like their image sensors, which will enable a generation of autonomous cars, and 360 Reality Audio, which aims to improve your listening experience, from headphones to the inside of cars. With that focus came a CES 2020 keynote that wasn’t about buzz words that are ultimately meaningless and more about actually connecting with customers by announcing ‘real’ products while at the same time giving us a glimpse of the decade that’s to come, making it their best CES keynote.
¹ More on this in another article.
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