SONY PUT A MUSIC PLAYER IN A PHONE BEFORE APPLE, BUT APPLE CHANGED WHAT THE PHONE WAS
Sony had already turned a phone into a Walkman. It even sold millions of them. Then Apple arrived and made people think about the entire phone differently.
In 2005, Sony Ericsson launched something that sounds strangely familiar today:
A phone that was also a serious music player.
It was called the W800.
It had the famous Walkman name.
It could play MP3 and AAC files.
It came with headphones.
And it could store roughly 150 songs on its standard memory, with support for additional memory cards.
This happened two years before the iPhone.
And the strange part is:
Sony wasn't failing.
It was actually doing extremely well.
SONY ALREADY KNEW MUSIC COULD SELL PHONES
Sony had something Apple didn't have in 2005:
Walkman.
The Walkman brand had spent decades becoming associated with portable music.
So Sony Ericsson didn't have to explain what a "music phone" was.
It could simply put this on the phone:
WALKMAN
And consumers already understood the message.
Sony Ericsson's own executives described the Walkman trademark as a major marketing advantage because it immediately communicated that the W800 was a serious music device.
The phone wasn't just:
a phone with an MP3 player.
It was marketed as:
a Walkman that happens to be a phone.
That distinction mattered.
THE W800 WASN'T A GIMMICK
The W800 had a 2-megapixel autofocus camera, removable memory, an MP3 player and software designed to transfer music from a computer.
Sony Ericsson wasn't treating music as a tiny extra feature.
It was building an entire product strategy around it.
And the company quickly expanded the idea.
W800.
W550.
W600.
W900.
Then more Walkman phones followed.
AND PEOPLE ACTUALLY BOUGHT THEM
This is where the original story becomes more interesting.
It wasn't:
Sony invented music phones → nobody cared → Apple saved the idea.
That's not what happened.
By the end of 2005, Sony Ericsson had shipped 3 million Walkman-branded phones since the first model launched in volume in August.
By the end of 2006, Sony Ericsson reported that it had sold 17 million Walkman phones.
So Sony had already demonstrated something important:
People wanted their music and their phone in the same device.
The market existed.
Apple didn't invent that desire.
SO WHAT DID APPLE ACTUALLY CHANGE?
The iPhone wasn't the first phone that could play music.
That wasn't the breakthrough.
The bigger change was the entire relationship between the device, software and content.
Apple combined:
iPod + phone + internet + touchscreen + software
into one product.
The iPhone was introduced in 2007 as a device that combined a phone, a widescreen iPod and an internet communicator.
That changed the question.
Sony had essentially asked:
"How do we make a phone good at music?"
Apple asked:
"What happens if the phone itself becomes the main computer people carry?"
That's a much bigger idea.
SONY HAD A GREAT PRODUCT — BUT A DIFFERENT STRATEGY
Sony Ericsson's strategy was based heavily on specialized identities.
There were phones for music.
Phones for photography.
Phones for business.
Phones for different price ranges.
The branding made sense.
A Walkman phone meant:
music.
A Cyber-shot phone meant:
photography.
In fact, Sony Ericsson later built a second major product line around Cyber-shot cameras. Its 2006 reports described both Walkman and Cyber-shot as strategic areas of the portfolio.
This was smart product segmentation.
But Apple's strategy was different.
Instead of creating a separate phone for every activity...
make one device good enough to do everything.
THE BIG DIFFERENCE WASN'T THE MP3 PLAYER
Imagine comparing the two ideas.
SONY ERICSSON
Phone
↓
Walkman music experience
↓
Camera
↓
Mobile internet
APPLE
One device
↓
Phone
↓
Music
↓
Internet
↓
Apps
↓
Camera
↓
Everything else
The difference wasn't simply hardware.
It was the architecture of the product.
SONY EVEN SAW THE PROBLEM COMING
There's an especially interesting detail in Sony Ericsson's own 2005 material.
The company acknowledged that putting better music functionality into phones could potentially create a problem for Sony's existing portable-music business.
But executives believed there was still a distinction between a phone and a dedicated music player, particularly because of storage capacity.
That assumption would become increasingly important.
Because the future wasn't necessarily:
phone + separate music player.
It was increasingly:
phone = music player.
THEN STORAGE STARTED DESTROYING THE OLD BOUNDARIES
The W800's standard memory was around 0.5GB, enough for roughly 150 songs, with support for memory cards.
Later Walkman phones pushed the idea much further.
Sony Ericsson's W850, for example, supported storage for up to 1,000 songs and eventually offered over-the-air music downloads through the company's PlayNow service.
The technology was moving quickly.
The dedicated MP3 player was no longer the only obvious place to carry your music.
THIS IS WHY THE STORY ISN'T "SONY LOST TO APPLE"
It's more complicated.
Sony Ericsson had already identified the trend.
It had:
the brand
the hardware
the music expertise
millions of customers
a growing product line
And it was making money.
Sony Ericsson shipped 51.2 million phones in 2005, generating €7.27 billion in sales. In 2006, shipments jumped to 74.8 million and sales reached almost €11 billion.
So the lesson isn't:
"Sony didn't understand mobile music."
It clearly did.
The more interesting lesson is:
Being early doesn't guarantee that you define the category.
APPLE DIDN'T INVENT THE IDEA
Apple didn't invent:
music on a phone.
It didn't invent:
touchscreens.
It didn't invent:
mobile internet.
It didn't invent:
smartphones.
What Apple did was combine existing technologies into a product whose entire experience felt unified.
And then the App Store pushed the concept even further.
The phone stopped being a fixed product.
It became a platform.
THAT'S THE BUSINESS LESSON
Sony had a powerful brand.
Apple had something different:
a system.
The difference between a successful product and a transformational product isn't always the individual feature.
Sometimes the feature already exists.
The real opportunity is figuring out how all the features connect.
Sony put a Walkman inside a phone.
Apple helped turn the phone into the place where the Walkman, camera, browser, software and eventually thousands of other products could live together.
MAACAT PERSPECTIVE
Sony wasn't too early because nobody wanted music on a phone.
Millions of people did.
Sony Ericsson proved it.
The W800 launched in 2005.
By the end of that year, 3 million Walkman phones had been shipped.
By the end of 2006, the number had reached 17 million.
The fascinating part is what happened next.
Apple didn't need to invent the idea.
It needed to reframe the entire device around it.
That's one of the most important lessons in technology:
You don't always win by inventing the feature first.
Sometimes you win by figuring out what the feature was really part of.
