Howard Stringer's Rise at Sony

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050310.html' target='_blank'>http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050310.html</a><br /><br /></div><i>"The Sony story is everywhere and is generally the same: Sony is in crisis, Nobuyuki Idei wasn't getting the job done, so Howard Stringer (head of Sony USA) is bringing his diplomatic skills to re-melding Sony's consumer electronics and content businesses. Too bad that story is wrong. The real news isn't Stringer's rise, but Ken Kutaragi's fall. Ken Kutaragi is the so-called "father of the PlayStation" -- an engineer who rose nearly to the top at Sony by being brash and taking risks. Kutaragi, a lifer like everyone else at Sony (except Stringer). made his name inside the company through his unique ability to fire his boss. That's right, fire his boss, and sometimes, his boss's boss."</i><br /><br />Robert X. Cringely has some very interesting thoughts about what's happened at Sony this week - and some surprising conclusions. Sony's corporate structure has always fascinated me (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=jasonsego&amp;path=ASIN/0618126945/qid=1110556212/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/">great book to read</a> on the subject) and this shake-up will have some interesting results.

[Felix Torres]

Cringely is not the first to suggest that Sony will spin-off the content business and refocus on the technical side.

Only problem is, Sony's problems aren't due to being content-centric; they're the result of their NIH-based culture.

The biggest example everybody keeps trotting out is that they failed to support MP3 because of content concerns.
That is not quite true: they did support MP3 from day one. More or less.
But the *way* they supported it is what killed them. Because they were promoting ATRAC and insisted on transcoding everything to ATRAC they made ATRAC sound worse that it had to and put ridiculous restrictions on the users that other products didn't.

Sony's DRM concerns are no different than anybody else's.
And most of the other hardware vendors have found ways to deal with content-provider concerns without shooting themselves in the foot.

Where Sony is unique is that they tried to solve all their problems on their own, reinventing the wheel over and over, just to be different.

In the electronics business, most products have two parts to them: the standard functionality that defines the segment, which all competitors in a segment offer (AM-FM tuners, etc) and the added value parts that distinguish your product from your competitors.

Sony has focused waaay too much on the latter and not enough on the former so their products don't always compare well to competitors in price or in features.

Stringer has his work cut out for him.