Sony To Cut About 10K Jobs

Pichu0102 writes "Reported by the Washington Post, Sony says it will cut about 7% of its jobs as well as sell about $1 billion of it's assets. It also will declare a loss for this year." From the article: "To help boost efficiency, Sony said it has abolished the company system that Stringer said was preventing different business units from communicating freely, causing overlap in development and missed opportunities in the market. The electronics group will be reorganized to place centralized decision-making over key business areas under Ryoji Chubachi, who became Sony's new president and electronics CEO in a major overhaul of management in June." Another reorg on the heels of Microsoft's decision from earlier this week.

Sony

[mikers]

Yeah, I remember when I stopped buying Sony products. Probably about 6 years ago today. My guess is that is probably when their troubles started.

Sony has this nack for being extremely hard-headed. They stuck to their Beta machines, and missed the entire VCR explosion; they stuck to minidisc and DPMS (copy prevention tech) and refused to even license the technology for the longest time. Copying from minidisc has always been severely hobbled.

Sony Trinitron was the $hit for many years. Except when they got ridicously over priced.

Then Sony missed the whole MP3 bandwagon, instead pushing their ATRAC DPMS enabled system -- which nobody wanted (sounds like Beta all over again).

Memory Stick -- another locked down format from Sony.

Turns out Copy protection schemes just don't sell very well (exception: IPod .. not the rule).

m

Strategic Business Management

[joelparker]

Sony was my final project for my recent Strategic Business Management course.

My group found that Sony's division conflicts were ruining Sony's strategic opportunities. A simple example is Sony's music division prohibiting Sony's electronics divsion from building DRM-free MP3 players.

A more complex example is Sony's movie division failing to work with with Sony's games division-- thus we get the PSP that can play movies, but there's no Sony "iMovies" store ready. What a strategic goof!

Our strategic management recommendation was for Sony to bring in new leadership, specifically someone to rock the boat and get the divisions working together.

Television Company

[Anonymous Coward]

Sony made it as a television manufacturing company. They never completely understood other businesses. Their shotgun approach at trying other products occasionaly got lucky and often were complete failures alienating some customers. I've been burned so many times by Sony gizmo failures that I gave up on them.

Sony has forgotten about the rigourous quaility control and innovation that made them a manufacturing giant. Like many big technology companies, they have been taken over by marketeers and accountants.
The visionless have replaced the visionaries and Sony remains a cautionary tail for companies and nations that abondon mercantilist precsion for globalist rhetoric.

Re:So does this reorg mean...

[Dark Paladin]

Agreed - I think that Sony spent more money and effort fighting "piracy" when they really meant "lock in", and paid the price for it.

There are legitimate ways of fight piracy (going after black market mass CD production dealers, for example) that are more effective than annoying customer base.

Sony could dissapear for all I care

[dbfruth]

Sony has been on a downward slide for quite some time. If they could just get over their "not invented here" mentality and not try to reinvent the wheel every time a new technology comes along. There is nothing wrong with taking something good and simply making it better and more compelling. If Sony made cars it would have square wheels and they would convince you that it was much better that way since you didn't need brakes anymore which by the way were also not invented at Sony.

buy startups instead of creating their own stuff

[demon411]

or maybe they need to start buying start ups instead of trying to create there own proprietary stuff, big companies are bad at innovation cause their existing technologies and products tend to prevent it.

accoriding to paul graham, big companies can't do product development. [paulgraham.com]

Re:Lame Sony

[darkitecture]

Actually, Matsushita is larger because of many, many reasons, the chief reason being that it was founded 28 years before Sony was.

Although it wasn't one of the Big Four zaibatsus, it was also dissolved after the Allied occupation of Japan and targeted for systematic breakup, however was saved by worker/family union petitions and thus is a much, much more significant staple of the Japanese economic landscape.

You might be an IT professional and graduate student, but I'm also an IT professional, Wharton School graduate and majored in Japanese Business and Economics ;)