How cool would it be if some big consumer electronics company that is really great at hardware design sold a smartwatch you could buy for under $100 that was open to any developer’s firmware?

That would be amazing, because as an open platform genius software developers could compete with each other to create the ultimate smartwatch experience, and they wouldn’t need to fuss with designing and manufacturing a physical hardware smartwatch.

Well, it’s happened. Sony this week announced an Open SmartWatch project that invites developers to create and flash their own firmware for the Sony SmartWatch.

This is bigger news than it sounds. 

Apple’s WWDC event is happening tomorrow. Because new announcements in the Apple space happen so rarely, and because that company is historically better than average at keeping secrets, everybody’s going to be watching WWDC to see what Apple announces. Above all, people care about Apple announcements because the company is easily the most influential brand in consumer electronics.

That wasn’t always so. Sony used to be the Apple of the consumer electronics market. In fact, Sony was probably Steve Jobs’ biggest inspiration, responsible for not only Jobs’ famous clothing (his turtlenecks were made by the maker of Sony company uniforms) but also the name Apple (Sony used to be called Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation and Jobs was inspired by Sony’s switch to a friendly, happy sounding corporate name).

Shockingly, Sony nowadays loses money on consumer electronics and makes most of its money from selling insurance. The reason Sony loses money is some combination of corporate inefficiency, lack of vision and, most of all, the fact that its products generally aren’t worth the money they charge for them.

In the past couple of decades, Sony has followed a familiar, frustrating pattern: They always enter consumer electronics market late with overpriced but very good hardware hobbled by their own software interfaces and applications nobody wants. They did it with laptops. They did it with netbooks. They did it with smartphones and tablets, too.

So nobody takes Sony seriously anymore. They’re a two-bit, washed-up has-been.

Or are they?

Every successful company has one massively great idea upon which all their success is based.

Google’s massively great idea is that amazing algorithms plus overwhelming compute power can solve just about any problem.

Apple’s massively great idea is that horrible content-consumption experiences can be fixed with blank-slate thinking and well-designed hardware-software-service combinations.

And Microsoft’s massively great idea, which preceded Google’s by decades, is that software does not want to be free. Software wants to be profitable and hardware wants to be a zero-margin commodity. The “secret sauce” for this approach, which enabled Microsoft to dominate for years, is that making more money on software lets you spend more on new software products, which gives you an advantage in emerging software markets.

The post-PC world is already dumbing young people down. Way down.

I’m hearing accounts by hiring managers that new applicants right out of school often lack not only basic “computing” skills (for example, they don’t really know how to do a Google search), but they lack the imagination, creativity or curiosity to even learn those skills.

There may be multiple causes for this phenomenon, but I’m here to throw the post-PC world under the school bus.

I used to mock Apple years ago because they advertised Apple as the fun alternative to stodgy, boring Windows.

The idea that Apple was fun and Microsoft was not was a misdirection at best. Windows was the biggest games platform and Xbox was the best console game (in my opinion). Apple had no games to speak of.

Five years ago, all that changed: Apple launched the iOS App Store, and it quickly became the biggest games platform ever, now making twice the money as portable game consoles. Apple’s App Store hit right when the casual and mobile games market was ready to take off in a big way.

The Android market is no slouch in the gaming arena, either, and will soon overtake the portable game console market as well.

But the mobile gaming market is still in its infancy. The Android gaming scene is about yesterday’s games — isolated, causal time-killing games, for the most part. So to take it to the next level, Google this week announced Google Play Games Services.

There are two gigantic opportunities that are potentially unique to Google: multi-device gaming and gaming as a mainstream spectator sport.