Why Sony's Clie couldn't make it in America

Over at Brighthand, Larry Becker tries to tackle the real reasons for why Sony is ditching out of the PDA market here in the States. Their biggest mistake he says? A misunderstanding of the biggest difference between American and Japanese consumers: the Japanese actually read the manual after the buy something, whereas Americans (and we're as guilty of this as anyone) tend to play first and ask questions later and then get frustrated if things aren't completely intuitive:

Unquestionably, Sony engineers are brilliant; they can make things smaller than anyone on the planet. They can
rewrite software to do amazing things on a PDA. They were first to market with lots of PDA enhancements. But they
didn't take the time to make their enhancements intuitive and thus non-manual-reading Americans thought their device
was too complicated or worse, broken.

Sony failed with Clies in the U.S. because its devices had numerous small software controls with cryptic icons,
buried settings with vast numbers of mystifying variables to set up things like Wi-Fi, and unnecessarily complicated
looking screens. Apparently for the Japanese consumer, a complicated-looking Applications screen suggests that the
device is cool and powerful. In America, the same screen is seen as too complicated and confusing, and if it requires
a manual to figure it out, it's going back to the store.

We hate to sound like a broken record, but this yet another one of those instances where Sony failed to learn the hard lesson that Apple has taken to heart if you want to bring technology to a mass market: you gotta keep it simple.