PSP

Salam,

I have been pondering on the idea of blogging for some time now. It surely must have been well over a year now when the thought of doing some sort of blogging came to my mind. After all, I kept a diary for a long time, though I would hardly call myself a regular 'friend' with my diary, it did help in conversing with myself and understanding myself better. Shamefully, the notebook that made me realise so much about myself is God knows where. I still have one of them with me but cannot picture what/where I left the other older ones. Surely Anne Frank's Diary is not her complete work, for all we know, there could be a lot of her work destroyed/lost etc, or so I tell myself, call it poor consolation or whatever you may wish.

Like so many people in Europe looking forward to PSP being released on 1st Sept, I cannot wait, it has been a while since I treated myself to such a pretty thing (ok, now that is a major lie!). Like thousands and thousands of Europeans, especially the British, it is not much of an option to go and buy the US version from eBay. As much as I love eBay, I want to make sure when I do get my beloved PSP, it is perfect. Unlike some people, I will not accept a single dead pixel or dust particle in this beauty. Seriously, for something that is known primarily for its amazing screen, why would anyone settle for less than immaculate article is beyond me.

On to the topic at hand, its about Sony. And frankly Im not very happy with the company. Lets ignore the fact that PSP has been in Japan for almost 1 whole year now, lets also ignore the fact that American spoilt brats got their PSPs in the first half of the year AND lets also ignore the fact that it still has not been announced how many units are being delivered to UK for launch. For all I know, I could come back home empty handed come 1st Sept. Nope, none of these are that big a problem for me, the biggest being that Sony executives decided something along the lines of 'hey, we've always been able to screw the UK consumers with high prices, lets carry this admirable feat with PSP, even if we know there is nothing to justify in this case...'. I was very pleased with the article in my fav magazine PCPRO about 'Rip-off Britain' and was pleasantly surprised that PCPRO even went ahead and advised us all to go shop on US websites if need be. Now thats a brave move and something to be commended upon.

Thinking of Sony, I decided to do a quick search on Sony's size and came across a really interesting page on GDP/sales of world economies. While it is dated year 2000, it shows Sony to be at no.71 ahead of Pakistan, a country with a population of 160million people. Its quite interesting where some of the large companies fare up to different countries.

My point on all above is that the UK needs to do something about this consumer Rip-off trend. Admittedly, its not Sony alone, pretty much all the companies charge a premium. Why? because they can. Car industry had a massive cut at the start of the century, now atleast the prices there are competitive to other European countries (forget America), something of similar nature needs to happen to the IT industry in this country and only us consumers can force them to come back with a better deal...


Link:
http://www.corporations.org/system/top100.html