SONY NW – HD5 MP3 PLAYER MARKET ANALYSIS

SONY NW – HD5 MP3 PLAYER MARKET ANALYSIS Mohammad Islam Arafat Salih Aydiner Information Retrieval – Fall 2005 12/07/2005 New Jersey Institute of Technology

OBJECTIVES • MP3 History • Problem Statement • Problem Description • Utilized Tools • Analysis Steps • Text Mining Analysis • Recommendations

MP3 History • Original name is MPEG Audio Layer 3 • Invented in the late 1980s by the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany. • Quality audio became transferable in the late 1990s • Sony invented Walkman 1979 • Around 1995 MP3 era has started

Problem Statement Portable audio market was shifted from digital era that MP3 players became popular. Sony was famous for Walkman product. After digital portable audio players started popping up, Sony lost its market to other companies, like Apple Macintosh iPod, Creative, and iRiver America VS.

Problem Description • Market Research using Text Mining • What are the reasons Sony lost the market share? • Design Issues • Functional Issues • Comparison with other competitors. Comparison was done between these products: Sony NW –HD5 iPod 20GB 4th Gen. Creative Zen Sleek iRiver H10

Utilized Tools • Spiders – R –US - Developed by Artificial Intelligent Lab, Department of Info. Sys. Arizona - Free toolkit to provide tools for different types of functions ( spidering, indexing, searching) - It is used for spidering to facilitate the collection of reviews from various websites. • Text Analyst - Text analyst helps you quickly summarize, efficiently navigate, and categorize the documents hierarchical - The software has limitations, and it wasn’t beneficial for the text analysis. - The software only highlights the text, it doesn’t have analysis part. - We didn’t use it

Utilized Tools • Convert Doc - Document Conversion Tool - Converts different formats to each other. - Due to limited version we didn’t use it. • Web2Text - HTML to ASCII converter. - Keeps the URL visible - Due to limitation and an error we abandon.

Utilized Tools • HtmlAsText - Converts HTML files to simple text documents. - Removes tags and scripts from the document. - We used this simple freeware utility to convert our documents. • WordStat - Text analysis software to study textual information such as responses open ended questions, interviews, title, journals, articles, etc… - It has categorization option by using dictionary approach. - It has exclusion list, word stemming - Relationships between words or categories as well as document similarity may be identified using hierarchical clustering and analysis. - We used this tool to analyze our documents.

Utilized Tools • SimStat - Statistical analysis program. - Scripting language and automated statistical analysis. - Apply context analysis and text mining features. - We used this software to start analyzing our documents.

Steps for Analysis • We analyzed the problem statement and chose our user review resources. www.amazon.com www.cnet.com www.pricegrabber.com www.eopinions.com http://shopping.yahoo.com/ 2. We collected almost 200 HTML user review documents for each company` s product. Spider – R – Us was used. 3. The collected documents were converted to Text file by using HtmlAsText. 4. We normalized the documents by manually and Windows OS search options. The number of documents reduced to: Sony NW – HD5 60 Creative Zen Sleek 40 iPod 20 GB 4th Generation 97 iRiver America H10 44

Steps for Analysis • Each documents were renamed according to their product review. • Document were converted to Database by using WordStat. • Database were opened by using SimStat. • Context Analysis was chosen to make the analysis and Text documents were chosen as a dependent variable. • WordStat was automatically fired up • We created the categories according to the common vocabulary that we had form user reviews. • We included excluded words and word stemming. • We run the analysis

Steps for Analysis DESIGN BOXY (1) BRICK (1) POOR_DESIGN (1) STYLISH (1) FEATURES BOOKMARKS_SUPPORT (1) CLICK_BUTTON (1) COLOR (1) G_SENSOR (1) LARGE_DISPLAY (1) MASSIVE_STORAGE (1) MONO_SCREEN (1) PICTURE_DISPLAY (1) SHOCK_PROTECTION (1) SKIP-FREE (1) USB (1) TOUCH_PAD (1) MP3_PLAYERS SOFTWARE CONFUSING (1) CRASH (1) CLUNKY (1) POOR (1) BATTERY_LIFE LONG (1) SHORT (1) PRICE CHEAP (1) COSTS_LESS (1) INEXPENSIVE (1) PRICEY (1) EXPENSIVE (1)

Text Mining Analysis We used frequency tables, cross tab diagrams, and Keyword – In – Context to analyze our documents. In the frequency tables we considered TF.IDF value to come up with the results. Cross tab is used to compare the number of occurrence for each terms by using its graphical representation. We used Keyword – In – Context to analyze the terms that showed an anomaly.

Text Mining Analysis General Comparison Results Sony NW-HD5 player has, such as high price, poor software, low battery life compared to its competitors, thicker size, mono-chromatic screen, data transfer is slow and design is not very stylish. Price- Cheap Battery Life – Long

Text Mining Analysis File Transfer – Slow Software- Poor

Recommendations • SonicStage Software needs to be upgraded or redeveloped to increase it reliability and performance. Data transfer will also improve once the software evolves. • Mono-Chromatic screen need to be changed with a color screen. • Style – the product need to be redesigned so that it look more stylish and it must consider it competitor so that the consumers’ style can be captured. • Battery life need to be improved and if its necessary there should be a joint collaboration with the battery companies. • The price must be reasonable and must be set while keeping mind the number features offered compared to it competitors. If needed the price should be reduced to make it more attractive to the consumer. • The product size must be reduced so that can be easily carried by the user.

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SONY NW – HD5 MP3 PLAYER MARKET ANALYSIS