Product Support

I have been wanting to write about certain aspects of Sony product support for a while and figured it would be a good timing now. It has been previously reported that Sony Customer service has improved a lot over the past few years and I myself have witnessed it where Sony has done some things I really did not expect. For example, I had to ship my Sony AV receiver to be serviced and when the service center received it, apparently it got pretty damaged and banged up. I got a call from Sony informing me about that unfortunate experience with FedEx. I was left with options to file claims with courier. However, I got an unexpected delivery from Sony a few days later and was pretty surprised to see a brand new Sony AV receiver. I was pretty stunned at such treatment, though it was not really Sony’s fault, they still decided to do the right thing for their customer. Since I am a VAIO enthusiast, I dealt with their VAIO Support and most of the times, the turn around and repairs were quick and professional. Again I might have been lucky, but there were some other instances where Sony came through for me. I did read on Sony forums of some really unfortunate experiences of other users, but things like that happen and if pursued correctly, could be resolved as well.

Today I actually wanted to talk about the actual product support, namely its after life support. An amazing example to such support is Sony’s PlayStation 3 console. I have owned it for 2 years now and this product has become more and more fun and feature packed. Thanks to its continuous support and firmware upgrades, PS3 has been the only product that stays up-to-date and current. Now, just think about, if only Sony kept its other products improved and up-to-date, would the brand be more stronger and reliable? Of course, it would be! A customer would be assured that he or she would not have to worry that in about 5 months, there will be another version of the same product with much improved features. Trust me, I do understand Sony is in the business of making money and product lines are essential and new products have to be out every quarter or so in order to stay in business and compete with others.

I would love to see Sony to be able to provide such improvements and be loyal to its offerings after they get certain products out of the door. Let’s take Sony’s Home Entertainment Server they introduced in 2007 – HES-V1000. It is a really fine product, aesthetically beautiful and has lots of potential if kept up to date. HES-V1000 is a 200 Blu-ray disk player, has 500GB of storage, and is DLNA certified, which means it can stream and serve your PC-locked music and videos directly to your HDTV. Unfortunately being the HDNA king, it is lacking HD Audio support like: Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD MA and Hi-Res codecs and I highly doubt this beast would support BD-Live! You would think that a simple firmware upgrade could fix that like it did with PS3 (years introduced prior), but no, after talking with Customer Support, the statement was the following: Sony is not planning on issuing such firmware upgrades. Why? No idea. I would love to assume that Sony’s engineers when proposing a new product always think that in the future a product can be firmware upgraded to add new features and iron out bugs. I have seen multiple Sony manuals stating that, and though it gave me hope, unfortunately it never came true for a lot of products. So one would usually think that paying a premium for a product (MSRP for HES-V1000 is $3500) would hopefully entitle you to a continuous product support (I am talking again about its internal not hardware related warranty issues), and most of the time, it is not a true statement.

There are lots and lots of similar examples, where Sony was not interested in improving its products. Locationfree products (LF-X1 and LF-X5) were left without PSP support that allowed to use it as a client, so people who spent $1500 for LF-X1 were left with an option to buy a new generation of the Locationfree Base LF-PK1. Certain VAIO products were also left out and forgotten by Sony. Network Walkman players were left to die with Atrac only support.

One thing I learned is to watch product updates on Sony Japan Support site. Yes, not the US or EU, but the Japanese site. The Sony JP support team constantly issues software and hardware updates and upgrades and most of the times those updates are compatible with a similar product introduced in the US. For some strange reason, there is no communication or maybe lack of it, between the two divisions (US and JP) and similar updates do not ever appear on the US or EU support sites. I have been able to stay up-to-date with most of my Sony products by using Japanese support site. In the past I successfully updated and improved my  Sony VAIO wireless LAN routers, VAIO MXS firmware updates, Roomlink, numerous software. Presently, I updated the VAIO WA Music Streamer (the fw update added a number of great features), Sony’s DSC-G1 camera, etc. Of course, one has to be careful as some of the updates are strictly for Japanese market.

So, this topic has been on my mind for a while and I know I am not the only one that has been affected by it (just check out Sony devoted forums) and since Sony is listening to us even more nowadays, let’s hope we’ll see some improvements and not just statements in the manual stating the fact of future upgrades. Of course, not all Sony products are firmware upgradable, I do understand that, so we cannot expect it for every product Sony makes…

Feel free to post your thoughts and ideas about this issue in the comments below. Happy weekend!