[hnuser52395]

Because otherwise, you end up like Dropbox. You may be the market leader right now, but competitors will catch up (Google Drive and OneDrive in this case), and your core business will be obsolete or less valuable. You would have wished you spent the resources expanding into other areas (which is what Google is doing right now by investing outside of search).

For example, Kodak already faced bankruptcy as a photographic film company. They smartly moved to pharmaceutical manufacturing.

If mobile gaming and/or AR/VR became so big by now that no one uses dedicated handhelds, Nintendo would have lost out on a lot of money. That didn't end up to be the case, but no one knew that at the time.

[dasil003]

Yeah, well I wouldn't have canceled by Dropbox subscription if they hadn't been so eager to turn it into some broad all-encompassing enterprise app.

I get that they have an audience, and the stakeholders have every inventive to try to leverage that attention into perpetual growth to stroke their own egos (and satisfy Wall Street), but this is why we can't have nice things.

Dropbox was plenty big enough to just be really good at file syncing in a platform agnostic way, this was literally better than Apple (despite Steve Jobs arrogant prognostication about "that's not a company that's a feature"), Microsoft or Google can ever achieve, because they always have the VP over their head making sure it serves their larger world-dominance agenda. This is the same reason Twitter had to measure itself against Facebook instead of recognizing that it had unique value as a protocol which Facebook never could have achieved regardless of DAUs or ad revenue numbers. The fact that "market rate" for software engineers is established by advertising/big data monopolies and everything of slightly lesser scale is deemed a failure is one of the saddest realities of our modern economy. The wonders we could have if the Berkeley tech hippies vision has been 20% closer to reality are truly astounding. As software engineers we live with an embarrassment of financial opportunity, juxtaposed against a dearth of technological vision and value delivered to the people.

[noobermin]

Look, it makes sense to diversify that's fine. That isn't what I'm poo-pooing at all. It's fine to spend some of your time and money on random side projects. The problem is priorities.

Anyhow, if it helps, the problem I'm really ranting about isn't the move to mobile but the latter part of the comment, which is the chasing of hype. People are so intoxicated with free market ideology that they really believe every move a company makes is really some invisible hand wisdom and they forget businesses are groups of people, that is human people. They underestimate how many moves are really just what I said, some people in management chasing hype. And chasing hype or better diversifying is fine and wise, it just needs to be done within scale to the threat currently faced and the resources at hand.

Dropbox is a one-trick pony so they are right to be worried. Sony is literally one of the biggest most diversified technology companies in the world. It probably is wise to have some presence in mobile if they really have none (although I doubt the article), but if you just read gaming media like the OP you think it some crime or deadly threat to Sony for it not to be a leading mobile IP owner yesterday. It's just the language is out of scale of the actual risk to Sony, and language of a media piece might not matter, you bet your socks some 24 year old fresh MBA somewhere in Sony USA is going to read this then start flinging slide decks to management about how they need to start dropping half a million on some mobile start up that is barely alive or something.

[dleslie]

Or you end up like Nintendo, who isn't going anywhere any time soon.

The problem for Kodak and Dropbox is that they made easily replicated products; whereas every great video game is unique in its own right.