Sony Playstation Network Breach

In an environment where it's difficult to turn a profit on hardware, Sony has pushed for the integration of hardware, software and the network to make money. To have this happen now is really unfavorable.

That's a quote that appears in today's Wall Street Journal from Nobuo Kurahashi, corporate research analyst at Mizuho Investors Securities in Tokyo. It's with reference to recent hacker penetration of  Sony Corp.'s online PlayStation videogame service. The Playstation Network has an estimated 77 million accounts and allows users connect online, play games against each other, chat and download televisin shows and movies. As I write this, it is not know whether hackers got users credit card information.

Sony, like most hardware companies has been following the Apple online store model and it appears to be working. According to the Wall Street Journal piece, under a mid-term business plan announced in late 2009, Sony said it aims to have a user base of 350 million network-connected devices while generating revenue of 300 billion yen ($3.65 billion) from the services business.

Yesterday, Sony said the company will stay on  track with current strategy. "This incident doesn't change Sony's fundamental strategy of networking products and providing services to our customers," said spokesman Shiro Kambe to the Wall Street Journal.

As more and more services and content goes up into the cloud, mobile and connected devices developed, and broadband bandwidths continue to rise we're going to see more of these kinds of attacks. You could easily substitute a number of other companies in place of Sony in the quote - just pick one with an online store.