Sony To Cut About 10K Jobs 178
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 going Open Source! (Score:5, Funny)
Sony is going Open Source???
What the hell is going on? (Score:1)
Re:What the hell is going on? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What the hell is going on? (Score:2)
Hmm... something about this sounds fishy. Outsourcing, PS2 and other suches do not sound like "a loss for this year". Sony should be booming, considering. Perhaps it's a marketing technique? We'll soon see.
No, nothing's really fishy. Excepting the play station, how many electronic products do you consider buying that have Sony at the top of the list?
Re:What the hell is going on? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What the hell is going on? (Score:2, Informative)
Isn't that how it works though? Similar to Subway. They can expand so massively because their costs are so low, courtesy of shit product. Low portions, bad meat, cheap suppliers. This is in contrast to Quiznos, who buys more expensive product that tastes better, better service, larger portions by far, and their meat is sliced in-house. Their problem is though, expansion. It's harder because they spend more on quality. Seems as Sony should do it as well, yes?
Re:What the hell is going on? (Score:2)
No, actually, Subway expands so massively because it's easy and cheap to obtain a Subway franchise. Few Subway restaurants are operated by the corporate parent -- most are just small owner/operators who had $12,000 to spare and decided to give sandwich sales a try.
Quizno's, in comparison, costs franchisees about twice as much in startup costs. Entrepreneurs are simply going to be less likely to take the risk.
Re:What the hell is going on? (Score:2)
Re:What the hell is going on? (Score:2)
12k gets you permission to use the subway name and products.
You still have obtain a building, decorate it, get it foodservice qualified for the local area and subway's standards, hire staff, obtain insurance, utilities, etc.
It gets expensive fast.
Re:What the hell is going on? (Score:2)
They cut their quality. Now the quizons near me are actually *lower quality* than the subways -- which have been improving their quality over the last few years (at least out here).
It used to be that a $8 Quiznos sub was delicious and a $5 Subway sub was naaasty.
Now, a $7 Quiznos sub is pretty bad, and a $6 Subway sub is passable.
Re:What the hell is going on? (Score:2)
Re:What the hell is going on? (Score:2)
The Black Angus sub at Quiznos used to be fantastic, but the quality of the meat used by the local stores I go to dropped pretty obviously. I've also had the beef dip sandwich with beef that had very obvious shimmer (bacteria).
Both restaurants are still much better than eating at the bottom tier burger restaurants though. I can't even bring myself to type their names, they are so repulsive.
Nowadays, I'd much rather find a few decent cheap ethnic restaurants than eat at a major chain. There are many good Meditteranean type sandwich shops that offer good fresh food at fairly cheap prices.
Re:What the hell is going on? (Score:2)
Re:What the hell is going on? (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:2)
Re:What the hell is going on? (Score:3, Insightful)
VCR, DVD player, phones, stereos, car disc players, Walkmen, MP3 players. That's a lot of money to be had.
Yes there's a lot of money to be had, it's just not being had by Sony anymore for the above products. They have too many competitors making decent products for less support more formats.
Re:What the hell is going on? (Score:4, Informative)
The phone market right now is being dominated by the mobile manufacturers, and Sony doesn't have a piece of that. Their walkman and MP3 player line was a complete bust because of their ridiculously greedy DRM system and its probably too late to try and compete against Apple in that market now unless they jump on the relatively unprofitable WMP bandwagon. PSPs have sold okay, but they're not the market leader there.
I'm pretty sure that they're still doing okay in the TV market which is a solid growth market, but they have serious competitors that take a large portion of that pie.
I'm no expert in media sales, but I don't think Sony's music and movies have been too high on the charts this year. I might be wrong, I just haven't noticed much of the Sony label. Their content business is huge, and when it takes a hit, the whole company does.
Re:What the hell is going on? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What the hell is going on? (Score:2)
In my opinion, Sony has fallen on hard times for the same reason that Zerox did several years ago. Their old patents expired and the competition has begun to compete on a level playing field. Serves them right, though. Rather than putting more money into research and development, they decided to get into the movie business instead. They only have themselves to blame.
Re:What the hell is going on? (Score:2)
Proprietary Employees? (Score:1, Funny)
So does this reorg mean... (Score:5, Insightful)
My understanding may be flawed, but it seemed that the Electronics division was having problems with the Entertainment division sticking their nose in and making life difficult. Instead of having an MP3 player, they had ATRAC players that would convert your MP3's for you. It was only after the first release tanked they brought out a new line that would natively play MP3, ATRAC, and (I think) AAC.
If the Electronic division is allowed to flourish and tell Entertainment to mind its own business, they will probably stand a greater chance to make products that people want, instead of want the Entertainment division wants to control.
Of course, this is all just my opinion - I could be wrong.
Re:So does this reorg mean... (Score:1)
Re:So does this reorg mean... (Score:1)
Re:So does this reorg mean... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:So does this reorg mean... (Score:2)
Re:So does this reorg mean... (Score:1)
Re:So does this reorg mean... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So does this reorg mean... (Score:2)
8-track?
Re:So does this reorg mean... (Score:2)
Re:So does this reorg mean... (Score:3, Insightful)
"... We are going to achieve our goals by breaking down the existing silo walls and eliminating the highly decentralized structure we've maintained in the past," said Stringer, a former journalist..."
So, no. Electronics will not have greater control over their products. Think "greater control" and "division" as in "Stalin" and "Communism".
Re:So does this reorg mean... (Score:1)
Re:So does this reorg mean... (Score:5, Informative)
I doubt it - Stringer was (and still is) head of Sony US. Most Sony US profits came from content licensing - not eletronics.
Before Sony, he was president of CBS Broadcast Group (who make content and not electronics)
PBS has an interesting interview [pbs.org] with Stringer, where his philosophies are pretty much stated:
I think its pretty obvious where this guy is coming from and what Sony are expecting from him.
We can expect worse from Sony in the future. Not better.
Re:So does this reorg mean... (Score:2)
Howard Stringer is the CEO of Sony. He stepped into this post recently. The 10k job cut is the first significant move Sony has made under his stewardship.
His successful background is in selling copyright, the fact the Sony has put him in charge has made it clear that Sony entertainment has won the turf war with Sony electronics.
Coupled with the cuts (that have hit robotics research and high end product development) we can expect Dell-like from Sony electronics and the same old crap from Sony Entertainment.
Such a pity.
Apologies for two posts.
Yet the recording side had no trouble... (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot to cut apostrophes (Score:1, Funny)
This has been coming awhile. (Score:1, Insightful)
A symptom (Score:5, Insightful)
Needs to do more than that (Score:2)
Maybe Stringer is (slowly) turning it into a pure hardware company.
Sony (Score:5, Interesting)
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
m
Re:Sony (Score:3, Insightful)
Betamax vs. VHS: Betamax was there first, but noone wanted to deal with Sony's excessive licensing requirementss.. Their competitors told Sony to get fscked and defined a new, free format: VHS.
Minidisk: Yet another proprietary format that noone wanted to license. Everyone went with whatever alternatives were available (DAT, and later CDR). Being the first media format with DRM-type restrictions didn't help either.
Memory Stick: Yet another proprietary format that noone wants to license. Also, any information about the format is restricted, preventing linux drivers for memory stick readers. That may be related to later versions that try to introduce DRM-type limitations.
ATRAC: Same thing again. Proprietary format noone will lincense and DRM.
The pricing of trinitron TVs is just marketing BS. For a while, they were worth the money just because the picture quality was so poor on everything else. Eventually competitors started to pay a little more attention to picture quality. Sony relied on the good name from when trinitron tubes really were better to demand a higher price. Anyway the TV thing really doesn't fit with the rest.
Re:Sony (Score:3, Insightful)
You should also remember that Sony did manage to create two of the most sucessful formats around. First the modern 3.5" floppy disk, and the CD-ROM (which they made with Phillips).
Re:Sony (Score:2)
Right, but the difference is that those formats' license fees are far lower. The main reason all the electronics companies went with VHS instead of Beta was because Sony's license fees were too high. Same for ATRAC vs. MP3; MP3 license fees are cheap (although still too much for open-source). Additionally, these other standards are open, if you're a company wanting to make products based on them. Sony has a reputation for being very strict with their stuff and trying to monopolize it, the way IBM did with the MCA architecture. Sorry, but making a new "standard", then either setting ridiculous license fees or not even allowing competitors to use the standard, and trying to get everyone to just buy products from you, does not work in real life.
Re:Sorry, off-topic question about MP3 License (Score:2)
So if you wanted to build and sell an MP3 player, you could use whatever MP3 decoder you wanted to (open-source or otherwise), but you'd still have to pay the same license fee to the patent holder. If you used a closed-source decoder, you'd probably have to pay an additional license fee to the company that owns it, which is separate from the patent license fee.
BTW, you wouldn't use LAME for an MP3 player since LAME is an MP3 encoder, not decoder.
Re:Sony (Score:2)
Enermax, same people that make the power supplies.
It works exactly like a USB drive and plugs in a USB port.
Don't know the model, it doesn't have one printed on it but it's got a blue LED and shows up as four USB devices.
Review: http://www.cluboc.net/reviews/card_readers/enerma
lsusb shows:
ID 05e3:0710 Genesys Logic, Inc.
dmesg shows:
Attached scsi removable disk sda at scsi3, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
Vendor: Generic Model: STORAGE DEVICE Rev: 9132
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 00
Attached scsi removable disk sdb at scsi3, channel 0, id 0, lun 1
Vendor: Generic Model: STORAGE DEVICE Rev: 9132
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 00
Attached scsi removable disk sdc at scsi3, channel 0, id 0, lun 2
Vendor: Generic Model: STORAGE DEVICE Rev: 9132
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 00
Attached scsi removable disk sdd at scsi3, channel 0, id 0, lun 3
Wish it had a USB hub, webserver and a hard drive.
Re:Sony (Score:2)
My main beef with Sony (apart from their tightfisted approach to formats) is that their laptops and desktops all use proprietary versions of hardware and drivers. You can only get the parts from sony, and you have to use the sony-fied drivers or you get crap.
One example I'll never forget is when my old boss told me that he wanted the OS on his micro-tiny vaio laptop to be reinstalled, after an HD wipe. He didn't spring for the $400 external -=CDROM=- drive, so you could not boot to the install disk. The machine came with all the system restore disks, but without that drive, you could not use them. I did manage to get an XP installation on it without having to boot from the CD (using a $45 external USB CDROM drive), but it was nearly unusable because the little HD would not let go of the old Win2K partition. It was dual-boot WinXP/Win2K and there wasn't much space left to do anything, and the display drivers were not quite right, so it'd lock up from time to time. What a headache.
They're blinded by domestic success (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sony (Score:3, Informative)
Minidisc - They sold a lot of Minidisc equipment in Asia, but not necessarily in the US. I have a minidisc recorder. It's still my favorite way to record through microphones and radio broadcasts. Plus they didn't solely rely on Minidisc. They made good CD Players, and nowadays their mid-range DVD players are very good.
Trinitron - The Wega TV was very, very popular.
MP3 - Yeah they missed the boat due to their ownership of Content. Oh well, looks like they're learning.
Memory Stick - You can buy these from at least 3 different companies now, and the prices have dropped (although they are still somewhat pricier than CF or SD).
I know Sony has made a lot of mistakes, but Cmon, most electronics companies on earth would love to be in their place. They make very good, very popular units for everything from Tvs to DVD Players, to laptops, on and on. Let's cut them a little slack here. I find few mistakes over the years, taking into account how many successes they've had. Not to mention the PS2, probably the most succesful game console of all time.
That's not a bad track record for one company!
Re:Sony (Score:2)
This was the case of Disney, IBM, MS, and all these companies are now suffer, or will likely soon suffer, because of it. In the case of Sony, their succes was based on IP infringement. People bought walkmen because they were small. Then these same people made copies of Albums for thier walkmans, for thier freinds walkmans, left them behind as they could just make another copy, pretty much decimated album sales. The fact that sales actually started to slump a few years before the walkman was ignored.
Now Sony has gotten religion and can't play fast and loose, and therefore wants to prevent others from playing fast and loose. They can't compete on innovation, because IP laws forbids them from innovated, so no one else can either. There is only so much one can do when one buys into the stogid status quo.
One thing I find most interesting is that Sony makes one of the best laptops, but, because they sell them with MS Windows, they must compete with the rest of the Windows crowd, which is mostly junk. One can imagine Sony having the resources, and Asia having the market, for a third OS, a la Apple, that could run the MS stuff, but interoperate and be friendly in such a way that Sony could differentiate the machine. That, however, would be innovation, and likely involve open source projects that would imperil the sanctity of abolsute IP, which would not go over well with the people who produce nothing at all, but still want to get paid.
Re:Sony (Score:2)
Which is why every all-in-one card reader has licenced the Memory Stick socket -- and gadzooks! a Memory Stick Pro socket as well!
Finding a reader was never the issue. The problem is that Memory Stick is a closed, Sony-controlled format. Subsequently, while the rest of the industry was driving the price down and the storage room up on formats like Compact Flash, Memory Stick products consistently cost 40% more and languished at least a full step behind in capacity. Add to this the fact that three dozen odd manufacturers were using the interchangeable CF format for all manner of devices, and people who bought Memory Stick could only use it in Sony products. Who gives a crap if all readers can read Memory Stick when the only way to write to it is with a Sony product?
Re:Sony (Score:2)
Did you actually 'get' that novel?
It would be "Nineteen Eighty-Four"-style language if (a) the language were being deliberately manipulated, altered and restricted by some authority to manipulate people into thinking their way, and (b) "shit" meant different things in different contexts (e.g. "Shit" meant good when referring to a Sony product, but bad when referring to Panasonic).
"Shit" and "the shit" may be irritating uses of language to some, but they have distinct (to the people using them) and consistent meanings; hence they don't reflect the fascistic control of language (and hence culture) that appeared in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
ATRAC and DRM in portable players (Score:5, Informative)
But converting MP3s or CDs to ATRAC required Sony's drivers and software (which never worked in Linux). This HAS to be the buggiest and most DRM ridden software I ever used. I was so frustrated with it that when I got a free 128Mb RCA Lyra MP3 player, I just sold my MD player and the 50-ish MDs that I had (40 of them blank, because I couldn't bring myself to record them all).
Sony may have added support for other formats recently, but I got burnt once with their MDs. Unless they offer compelling new features over their competition, I don't see a reason I'd ever consider another Sony product.
Call it the iPod effect... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Call it the iPod effect... (Score:2)
Another form of iPod Halo (Score:2)
Strategic Business Management (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Strategic Business Management (Score:2)
Re:Strategic Business Management (Score:2)
Re:Strategic Business Management (Score:2)
Wow, your group discovered the exact same thing I discovered three years ago when Wired wrote an article about it. Hooray college!
When I proved that sin^2(x) + cos^2(x) = 1, I think it had been done once or twice before, also.
Class project != new research.
Television Company (Score:2, Interesting)
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:Television Company (Score:2)
I dunno. I like my companies and nations with a little extra backside.
Is that... (Score:2)
10K hex : 65,536
or
10K binary: 10,240 ?? ( I just hate my Sony car CD player-- no way I see to turn off the barber-pole advertising-- front-panel eject button too easy to hit-- other buttons too hard to hit-- and it often thinks it has a CD in it when it doesnt-- yechhh! )
Re:Is that... (Score:2)
Re:Is that... (Score:2)
Tim
Sony could dissapear for all I care (Score:3, Interesting)
Reorg overdue (Score:4, Insightful)
For example, Sony used to have something like five different divisions which developed and marketed video cameras. This kind of effect is going to arise sooner or later in any large organization, but a bit of refactoring and consolidation now and then has to be a good thing.
Re:Reorg overdue (Score:2)
"reorg of management" (Score:2, Insightful)
Should be read as "bonuses for management, layoffs for everyone else".
Re:"reorg of management" (Score:2)
Eliminating silos a good thing (Score:5, Informative)
I haven't read Howard's announcement in detail yet, but my first impression is pretty good. Several years ago, I worked for Sony Corporation of America (for a while there, Howard was my boss's boss). Getting the different operating companies to work together for the good of the larger corporation was extremely difficult. Management for each operating company was compensated based on the performance of that individual operating company. Music execs got paid well when they sold lots of music. This went down to a fairly fine grain - Sony Classical was extremely happy to have the soundtrack to "Titanic" on their label. There was no motivation for the music company to do something to benefit the electronics company, and vice-versa. The Playstation company was making so much money, they went off and did their own thing entirely.
Eliminating the barriers between the operating companies will be a painful transition, but all in all, probably a good thing.
I'm not particularly in favor of eliminating jobs, though 7% over half a year isn't much - most of that is probably natural attrition. When Sony cut jobs while I was there, it was all attrition, and I think it was 4 or 5%.
The market doesn't seem to like it - Sony is down about 100 yen against a share price of 4000ish since the announcement, but the market may have been expecting something more dramatic. Anyway, my initial $0.02.... ObDisclaimer - I haven't worked there for years, I don't consult for them, and I don't own their stock.
buy startups instead of creating their own stuff (Score:2, Interesting)
accoriding to paul graham, big companies can't do product development. [paulgraham.com]
Sony, blechh (Score:4, Insightful)
Ever since I invested heavily in MD equipment first introduced by SONY, willingly paying the bleeding edge tax for what I thought was cool technology, and ever since Sony kept a white-knuckled grip on the control and licensing of that technology, effectively keeping the price sky high, and effectively killing it as a potential great medium, and effectively rendering my speculative investment worthless, I've avoided them like the plague.
Sony is very close to being the Microsoft of the electronics industry, except they haven't managed to garner the same dominant position (percentage-wise) in the electronics market as Microsoft has in the OS/software market. But, they keep trying with heavy-handed business practices, sky high (artificially) pricing, and proprietary non-interoperable (think memory sticks, "mp3" (heh) players, etc.) gadgets.
Maybe this shakeup can bring a change in attitude, a change in latitude, to their approach. I doubt it. But I can hope.
s/it's assets/its assets (Score:2)
Re:s/it's assets/its assets (Score:2)
"Ill copy-edit this stuff. You're choice."
Don't worry. (Score:2)
To offset the costs of PS3 (Score:2)
Chubachi (Score:2)
My Hello Kitty Pink Slip... (Score:2)
Re:Record Label (Score:4, Informative)
Of course, laying off staff won't actually increase sales. Decrease costs? Yes.
which is bound to make them a large amount of revenueRevenue and profit are very different beasts, too.
Believe me...I know these things. After all, I used to work for JDS Uniphase [yahoo.com].
Re:Record Label (Score:2)
Re:Apostrocity (Score:1, Offtopic)
Especially since that error showed up in two consecutive sentences.
I'm starting to lose hope that people will ever use it correctly...
Re:Apostrocity (Score:2)
No... (Score:1)
It's the iPod's doing. Crufty Apple Computer has taught Sony a thing or two with this toy.
the new Sony Walkman: "Please clean out your desk and walk, man."
Comment removed (Score:2)
Re:Lame Sony (Score:2)
Declare bankruptcy and "take it out on their employees" allowing the creditors to acquire "and continue to push their doomed technology".
Either way the employees would be out of work.
-nB
Re:Lame Sony (Score:5, Insightful)
how would saying "WERE FUCKED!!!!" save those jobs ?? instead of going bankrupt they reorganize like they fucking should, at least then not all of their employees end up unemployed.
(oh and parts of this whole thing would be to prevent overlapping, like pda/computers vs. psp)
Re:Lame Sony (Score:2)
Because they will still go bankrupt in long term. Layoffs only give short term benefits because employees appear to be the most exspensive item in the budget. However, those employees were obviously doing something to benefit the company unless they were sitting around doing nothing and if they were that piss poor organized to begin with and that's more of an upper managment issue for not firing the people a long time ago on an individual basis and won't matter how many people they layoff unless they take people off the top.
If you fire off all your manpower and brainpower then you start to have lost productivity, lost sales, and lost innovation by the overworked people left over. It's like keeping from starving to death on a deserted island by cutting off you foot and eating it. Sure... It will keep you alive for a bit, but if you need to chase after wild animals for food then you are pretty much screwed.
Companies would be better to cancel projects and streamline spending and have individual firings as laying off peopel based off poor performance and lack of value to the company rather than picking a section of the company and giving them the axe with no rhyme or reason.
Re:Lame Sony (Score:2)
I used to work for adaptec and this is exactly what they did (see where they are now) the last thing i heard from the few unlucky souls who work there, is that they sold off there engineering and are now contacting their engineering out...
Re:Lame Sony (Score:2)
Re:Lame Sony (Score:2)
Sony is willing to risk jobs and billions of dollars in favor of having control (and royalties) over the Blu-Ray/BetamaxDisc medium instead of going for another open-forum standard like the original DVD was.
And regarding the PSP, that was just an obvious and total failure. I'm sure there's like 5 or 6 Slashdotters who enjoy their limited run 1.5 BIOS PSP running illegal emulators in stretched resolution (all of which can be done easier and better on the GPX2, besides the fact that all future PSP's cannot be hacked and will require BIOS updates for future games if they do get hacked), but the PSP is a general failure.
Then there's the PS3, well, the costs involved there speak for itself...
Re:Lame Sony (Score:2)
No.
Just, No.
Though I do believe that Nintendo will ultimately continue to dominate the handheld console market, there's no denying that Sony has really given them a run for their money. Nobody has ever been able to do that in the market before -- not Sega, not Atari, not Tiger, not whomever it is that makes the GPX2, whatever that is.
Re:Lame Sony (Score:3, Informative)
Considering that despite the lesser storage capacity, the HD-DVD seems to have better DRM and scratch-resistance than the Blu-Ray, I don't see how Blu-Ray is necesarily "better". Plus Blu-Ray players have been announced to need to connect [slashdot.org] to some kind of servers to activate otherwise they "punish" you, as well as having self-destruct codes [slashdot.org].
Re:Lame Sony (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Lame Sony (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, that's either an exaggeration or amazingly naive. If you honestly believe that the PSP, Blu-Ray and the PS3 are going to bankrupt a company with 151,000 employees and about a gajillion patents, a company that rakes in about $70billion a year in revenue, then you seriously need to stop smoking the reefer and pay attention in summer school.
Companies of Sony's size don't 'break' over one generation of marketing mistakes. The problem is much larger than a couple of wrong turns with products. Such a thing is achieved through the "head against a brick wall" method. Be stubborn enough to keep making the same mistakes and eventually they'll go broke.
If Sony ever goes bankrupt, it'll be because five or ten years from now, they're still climbing over each other, fisting big sweaty handfuls of dollars up the asses of their lawyers trying to revive the dead horse carcass they call a music business model that's been lying on the sidewalk for the past six years. If they'd spent a quarter of what they've already spent on their RIAA/MPAA legal bills on a decent online business infrastructure, they'd be raking in more money than iTunes.
Imagine that; 1999 and Sony releases SonySongStore.com - any songs by any Sony recording artist for $1, any album for $12 - they'd have forced Universal, EMI and Warner to all open their own websites to give their own artists a piece of the online pie. Then they wouldn't have to care so much about trying to force what *they* think is popular music onto the public. Instead, they could promote three times as many new artists for cents on the dollar using online advertising and, well you know, let the market sort the wheat from the chaff. No more need to sign huge, long term contracts with new, unknown artists, creating risky investments. Instead, sign them on so as they can provide their songs for download on your site, pay for minimal bandwidth costs if they go bust or end up raking it in because a shitload of people have downloaded their songs, realized they're actually talented and you've got yourselves a star.
Not to mention that if they'd done all of this six years ago, I guarantee you Sony would have brought out their own MP3 player years before Apple did and it would have become the benchmark. It would have essentially become the Walkman/Discman of the current generation. Instead, they're constantly trying to play catch-up, wondering why they can't keep up whilst simultaneously refusing to let go of the starting post.
Easier said than done, I know. But regardless my original point remains valid; If Sony ever goes bankrupt, it will be because they're still continuing with this DRM/RIAA/MPAA death spiral of a charade two or three CEOs from now. It's worse than they think because it's not just a error of judgement that's affecting their entertainment section; it's filtering across to their R&D department (taking a couple of years to finally release a decent MP3 player that, you know, actually plays MP3s), their marketing department ("Trust us when we say you'd rather have your songs in ATRAC format") and until someone towards the pointy end of the pyramid decides to say, "Uhh, hey guys I think we're on the wrong track here", they're going to continue to get screwed with their pants on.
Sorry heh,
Re:Lame Sony (Score:2)
Re:Lame Sony (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:Lame Sony (Score:2)
1) 23 2) IT professional and graduate student 3) Better at making preditions than you, apperently.
Re:Dude, what are you talking about? (Score:3, Informative)
Shocking? Sad? No. (Score:2, Informative)
I can't see how any
I personally can't think of a single Sony item I own, either. They can fire all their employees and sink their Board of Directors in the Marianas Trench and I wouldn't care. In fact, they can sink all their "artists" over at the music division and make the world a better place.
Re:Who would have thought... (Score:2)
I don't want to rub it in, but it's somehow fun to see Sony having money problem while all the Sony fanboys keep claiming "Nintendo is going down" or "They should stop making consoles" or "The GC is a total failure, Sony p0wned them" or "The PSP is such a success, Nintendo should stop trying".
There used to be a time when Sony could afford to sell its consoles at a loss and make it up with profits from other parts of the company, but methinks they will have to put a pretty high pricetag on the PS3 if they can't afford to lose money on the hardware anymore.