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(AP Photo/Shuji Kajiyama)
Sony Corp.'s employee Rumi Yamaguchi smiles in front of a special display commemorating the Sony Walkman's 30th anniversary that opens Wednesday, July 1, 2009, at Sony Archive building in Tokyo, Japan. The first portable cassette-tape player Walkman, shown second from left on the top shelf, hit the Japanese market on July 1, 1979.
But Stringer, and his predecessors, have been making that same promise for years.
When the iPod began selling like hotcakes several years ago, a Japanese reporter asked Shizuo Takashino, one of the developers of the original Walkman, why Sony hadn't come up with the idea. Afterall, the iPod seemed like something that should have been a trademark Sony product.
Takashino had been showing reporters the latest Walkman models, which played proprietary files. Sony has been criticized for sticking to such proprietary formats. One major reason for the iPod's massive popularity was that it played MP3 files, which are widely used for online music and compatible with many devices.
In a special display at Tokyo's Sony Archive building, opening Wednesday to commemorate the Walkman's 30-year history, an impassioned Akio Morita, Sony's co-founder, speaks to employees in a 1989 video to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Walkman.
"We can deliver a totally new kind of thrill to people with the Walkman," said the silver-haired Morita, proudly wearing a gray factory-worker jacket and surrounding himself with dozens of colorful Walkman machines. "We must make more and more products like the Walkman."
Morita acknowledges in the video that the Walkman doesn't feature any groundbreaking technology but merely repackaged old ones _ but did so in a nifty creative way. And it started with a small simple idea _ enjoying music anywhere, without bothering people around you.
The original Walkman was as big as a paperback book, and weighed 390 grams (14 ounces). It wasn't cheap, especially for those days, costing 33,000 yen ($340).
But people snatched it up.
Other names were initially tried for international markets like "soundabout" and "stowaway." Sony soon settled on Walkman. The original logo had little feet on the A's in "WALKMAN."
Many, even within Sony, were skeptical of the idea because earphones back then were associated with unfashionable, hard-of-hearing old people. But Morita was convinced he had a hit.
