Analysis: Sony and Apple growing ever more alike

Sony's foray into music downloads this week unleashes the most potent rival yet to Apple's iTunes Music Store, setting the stage for a high-stakes battle between two technology titans known for stylish innovation.

And if you squint just a little, Apple and Sony seem to look more alike by the day.

It's not just that both are using pop singer Sheryl Crow to tout their digital music services.

Sony's Connect store and associated electronics are part of the Japanese giant's bid to recapture its role as the personal electronics leader. Its position as such has long been taken for granted but has been eclipsed to a degree by Apple over the past two years with its incredible iPod success.

Sony literally invented portable mass-market audio, with the introduction of the Walkman tape player in 1979. But the company saw its dominance slip with the emergence of the MP3 compression format.

A number of rivals stepped into the void in the late 1990s with players to handle the new MP3 format. But the market never really took off until Apple released the first iPod player in November 2001. Armed with its tiny hard drive and enviable interface, the iPod did for Apple what the Walkman had done for Sony in the early 1980s.

Adding insult to injury, Apple's successful release of the iPod drew in large part from the Walkman's own early days. Staffers from Sony spent days riding the subways of Tokyo with the unfamiliar headphones in their ears, trying to elicit people's questions and interest - not unlike the way Apple has used the iPod's white earbud headphones as one of its best advertising campaigns.

Sony, similar to Apple's later rock star-studded events, enlisted celebrities to have their photos taken while wearing Walkman headphones.

Both companies are increasingly positioning their products as the centrepiece of "digital homes", envisioning a time when digital media flows easily across home networks between computers, televisions, MP3 players and other devices.

Jupiter Research analyst Michael Gartenberg said: "We're talking about companies that are vying for similar things but coming about it in different ways. With Apple, the core tech is the Macintosh. Sony has a lot of irons in the fire."

Each company is looking closely at a long-predicted future, when digital "convergence" potentially allows traditionally separate hardware and software markets to merge into a single device that can surf the net, play movies, music and video games, and serve as the brain of a network that distributes that content to subsidiary devices around a home.

The signs that this convergence is taking root are growing daily, driven by fast-rising adoption rates for broadband internet services, home networking advances, and growing use of digital media such as video games and online music.

Dominic Ainscough, an analyst at The Yankee Group, said: "Certainly with Sony, Apple and Microsoft, the traditional definition of what these companies are is changing. They are going more head-to-head from a product perspective."

John Borland writes for News.com