Mainichi News: Sony to scrap Aibo
I don’t even own one and I’m depressed about this.
I work in advertising and branding, and most of the things I do are fairly low profile. If you live outside the US, there’s a decent chance you’ve seen something I’ve written (well, besides here), but nothing that would stick in your mind or have you swapping quotes with co-workers the next day. Even I hardly ever notice them. The only exception was Aibo.
About eight years ago, we were hired by Sony to come up with a name for a new product. I remember the first demonstration we got inside one of the labs. It wasn’t just a toy, and it certainly wasn’t an appliance. It didn’t do anything definably useful, but it was amazing to watch the little prototype the engineers showed us. At that time, they said they didn’t want it to be a dog, or a cat, or any type of animal. It didn’t have the ears, nose and shaped body that the commerical model ended up having later. It was just supposed to be a pet robot.
I brainstormed about 200 different names or so, and Aibo was one of them, for the reasons the article mentions. As I was going through the list, I noticed that it also had a meaning in Japanese (companion), so I short-listed it. Sony liked it, and it made the first couple of cuts to end up as one of the final few choices. At that time I left the agency I was with to work elsewhere, and that was the last I heard until I opened the paper about six months later, and there it was. I heard later from my old co-workers that the managers at the first agency were all claiming that they thought of Aibo, and on the documentary show Project X, some Sony exec said that he’s the one who thought of it. That doesn’t bother me too much, since everyone at the agency I work with now believes me (oddly, when we did projects for Sony, the Sony people also believed me. I guess they’re used to the top brass stealing credit for everything). No matter what though, whenever I saw the name or heard someone talking about it, I could enjoy knowing that that was something I had created.
Anyway, no matter how much I came to dislike Sony (both for their corporate practices and for being such annoying clients), I always had a slight soft spot for them, because of Aibo. And now it’s gone, along with the rest of their robotics division. Products like Aibo and Qrio always made Sony seem a little like the Willy Wonka of electronics. Now they’re just another appliance maker.