What went wrong at Sony Corporation

[Pooh]

Here's an excellent article from the Wall Street Journal back in late June which provides many of the really grubby details about what went wrong at Sony. I find it amazing that a large number of Sony employees weren't simply fired for gross incompetence and various displays of profound disloyalty to their employer. The recent fiasco over Connect software shows that the problems are a long way from being resolved. To be honest, I'm not sure I even care any longer. Sony have shown such a level of real contempt for their very loyal customers that it's doubtful the company deserves to survive. This last act of lunacy with their latest players should be the final straw.

Wherever the good Akio Morito is spending eternity, I hope the news of what these incompetent fools are in the process of doing to the exceedingly fine company he built up over many decades is being kept well away from him. His memory deserved so much better.

Sony's new CEO fights discord at rival units

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05180/530332.stm

[Ascariss]

Haha, funny how everything there explains what we have now on the market and why things are they way they are.

First why wasn't Mr. Fukushima saked? this guy doesn't seem to be a team player.

It was clear there wasn't any contact between the various divisions, Connect didn't get us anywhere, sonicstage really wasn't the product sony wanted it to be, until near the end, when they got their shit together.

And Sony's U.S. music unit -- formed with the purchase of CBS Records in 1988 -- was afraid its sales would be hit by free music downloads. It wanted to hold off on everything until strict antipiracy measures were ready.

Hahaha, ya well that got you to a nice place now huh.

Some Tokyo engineers say privately that they remain wary of listening too closely to Sony's entertainment units -- whom they blame for obstructing new electronics products by worrying too much about piracy.

Funny, sony has an edge with their casette walkmans and cd walkmans, but once the digital age of hte mp3 came along, all things just fell apart. Piracy was also occuring with tapes and cd players back then as well. But the products still sold. why? because they were of great value and lasted. People needed something to play their copied tapes and cds on something, sony provided that. Sadly, too bad they didn't go that route for the mp3 age.

On the gadget side, U.S. marketers pushed for a version of the Walkman that stored music on a little hard disk, like the wildly successful iPod, as well as Walkmans capable of playing music files encoded in the MP3 format, the de facto standard in the U.S....

Instead of a hard disk, Mr. Fukushima initially opted to have the Connect-linked Walkmans use a high-capacity version of the MiniDisc, which stores music on a removable cartridge and is popular in Japan but never took off in the U.S., say people close to the Walkman division. When Mr. Fukushima's team finally made a hard-drive Walkman, he said in an interview that hard-drive gadgets "aren't interesting" because "anyone can make them."

Huh, apple was onto something here with these hard drive players? lol you know what this reminds me of, that cartoon that was posted here, "we're sony fuck 'em".

funny how HDD players are not interesting anymore, sony made almost 4 different models. HD1, HD3, HD 5, VP and now the new A series.

The PC group quietly stopped production of its rival hard-disk portable audio device in May.

VP dies, it was never meant to be sadly though.

All in all the article even though it is old, still gives a nice insight into how this all came to be. It reminds me of GM and their situation before bob lutz came in.