The latest print version of Business 2.0 offers an article about Sony's CEO Nobuyuki Idei.
While it has appeared that Sony is positioning itself as a direct competitor with Apple, the two companies have apparently been working together. According to Idei:
There are a lot of joint projects going on between Sony and Apple. I've seen Steve Jobs three times in the past year, and we talk a lot about how we can define common technologies for, say music downloads. We are working with Apple on improving connectivity with camcorders. We make great use of QuickTime in our Sony Ericsson telephones and in our Clie PDA's.
Idei goes on to say that they would like to work more closely with Apple.