Sony brought in Sir Howard Stringer, a peer of the realm, a few years ago to help turn Sony around. The results, as you’ll note, have been less than staggering. Now, however, Stringer is really going to get the job done and will trim 16,000 jobs and restructure the company in order to bring Sony back to the great heights from which it has fallen.
The past decade has been hard on Sony. XBox ate their PlayStation lunch and “cheap” has supplanted “good” in the minds of consumers, thereby reducing Sony’s value considerably. Sony has always been synonymous with quality but now that quality doesn’t matter, where does Sony fit?
The biggest problem has been the slow acceptance of Sony’s Japanese employees to a turnaround. While Japanese workers expect a “job for life,” Stringer can’t spare from the firings lest he be seen as favoring Asian employees over those in the rest of the world.
“We used to get the message: ‘Make a high-quality product’. Now we don’t know what we should be doing, except maybe not spending any money,” said one engineer who has left the company.
Friends, Sony may not be long for this world, at least in the way we remember it. As you’ll recall, LG is actually Lucky Goldstar, a brand that became synonymous with junk. Maybe Sony needs the same shock treatment.
Sony has long been known for making expensive products that do not merit the price tag. While they would like us to thing they are the paramount of quality, it just isn’t the case. They lack either the design or the quality to necessitate a retail store and consumer confidence in their products has been on a decline for at least a decade.
I think the long decline for Sony started sometime around the mini disc. They pushed that hard like they are with BR but it never really took off despite the number of companies on board.
sony just has a history or trying to reinvent the wheel and failing for it. Most recently we see it in their insistence on BluRay. they sacrificed the PS3 for the format and lost on both fronts. Now their cell phones are going to crap. Maybe they need to stop trying to innovate for a minute and focus on design and quality. All signs point to the tech industry slowing down and consumers not being as interested in early adoption of new tech. Not to mention the gains are slow these days, and cost a lot so what is the point.
Go back to the basics and save the brand, or innovate and die a slow and ugly death while the rest of the tech industry laughs and steals your customers.
Brad beat me to it. Sony makes quality products – but so do many other companies, and at generally better prices. The PS3, PSP, and Vaio P all exude quality, technical superiority, and elegance – but they’re all priced exorbitantly. It sickens me to see Sony repeat the mistake of the PS3 with the Vaio P…
Furthermore, Sony loves proprietary formats even more than Apple or Microsoft (likely due to the influence of their entertainment division) think ATRAC and Memory Stick. Not to mention many formats that have only found middling success in niche markets, like Betamax and Minidisc. And now we have Bluray, which might have taken off if not for the protracted struggle with HD-DVD.
And now Joshua beat me to it. :) I had this conversation with a coworker who hadn’t really thought about it.. but I pointed out that I think Sony was a fantastic company when it was a true inventor or a company run by engineers and making hardware (Walkman, headphones, receivers, tuners, etc.). I personally think that Sony started to die the day they bought up the media companies and the left hand didn’t like what the right hand was doing. That’s when the hardware divisions began all their infighting with the media divisions and, usually, the media divisions won out or crippled the hardware engineers. That’s when we started to see things like ATRAC when everyone else was agreeing on MP3’s and the Memory Stick when everyone else was agreeing on CompactFlash or SD cards. Their hardware divisions sometimes managed to win out–like with the original Playstation and Playstation 2 to a lesser degree but you can definitely see the fight lost over in the Playstation 3 where the studio finally gets to dictate the strict DRM and proprietary formats that increased the cost and lowered the quality of the product.
+1 Absolutely but the execs are too stubborn to listen to these truths.
HD-DVD is gone, everyone is pushing BlueRay. Just check out the recent CES. Blueray has a higher compatibility rate. HD-DVD is now obsolete.
Sorry my ending was sort of abrupt. Your right Joshua about Blue Ray taking off due to HD’s perpetual struggle. On the contrary to Sony’s decline, I think once the market settles PS3 will do well considering its BR compatibility. And since the entire market is pushing BR I think it will do well. Also keep
in mind Steve Job’s temporary absence from Apple due to his health. Last time Jobs left, Apple tanked leaving competitors with healthy quarters. I wouldn’t be surprised if Sony pulls ahead in the future. Even with such a volatile market.
Sony is pathetic. How SIR got to be head of it one cannot imagine. Anyone who is so pompous that he would call himself SIR is also so out of touch with the Sony consumer that he should be lined up and tortured into resignation with a Nintendo Wii.
This guy is a self-impressed doofus who is fooling around with the Japanese board of directors like a hooker in a bootcamp.
He’s a typical fat Hollywood and New York media-crat schmoozer.
He doesn’t belong at a great company like Sony because he could manufacture a paper hat.
Sony will never recover until this curly-haired thistle arse is carted back home on one way ANA flight.
Sir Dingus Muffindew. I think you meant, “he couldn’t manufacture a paper hat.”
Nice analogy. They do make paper hats here in New York and over in Tokyo (which I plan to visit when Speed Racer goes on vacation).
sony has become the cheap side show of a brand that used to mean quality. just look at the calss action lawsuits and the outright lies and cover up on the XSRD XBR.