imagestation

Few tears shed for Sony's ImageStation

Mary Jane Irwin · 09/21/07 03:30PM

Sony's photo-sharing site, ImageStation, is quickly following in its sister music site Connect's footsteps, dancing itself out of business, and is closing in February 2008. Meant to boost use of its Cyber-shot digital camera line, ImageStation failed to compete with the likes of Yahoo's Flickr, and its users are having their albums shuffled off to Shutterfly, one of the few remaining independent photo sites. (Kodak bought Ofoto, and HP, another camera maker, owns Snapfish.) ImageStation's failure is not much of a surprise, considering Sony has proven itself, time and again, incapable of coding its way out of a paper bag. Aside from the videogame business, where it has a thriving in-house development studio building games for its PlayStation consoles, Sony has repeatedly bungled all of its efforts to tie together its gadgets with software and websites. A suggestion to CEO Howard Stringer: Stick to to what we know and love your company for — that is, really swank HDTVs.