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February 8, 2014 12:00 pm GMT

Sony Looks To The Past To Move Forward

tr63cThe PlayStation. The Walkman. The Trinitron. The transistor radio. All icons in Sony’s storied history from an era when the Japanese giants still roamed the earth. The Sony of today is not like the Sony of yesterday. For every memorable blockbuster, there’s an infamous flub: The late embrace of MP3, losing its hold on the digital imaging market and of course, failing to attract adoption to Betamax, UMD, MemoryStick, and endless other formats and systems. The Sony of today is a bloated industrial machine barely holding together. It’s worn out and slowed to a crawl. The once innovative company now follows instead of leads. It’s playing catch-up instead of breaking new ground. But things are changing. The Sony of tomorrow is looking leaner than ever. It doesn’t look like the Sony of old with total market dominance, but for the first time in ages, Sony is becoming a competitor. Sony’s harsh reaction to bloat is not the exception throughout the electronics world. HP is being crushed under its own weight. Samsung makes everything from semiconductors to home appliances to 50 ton war machines. Dell is shedding employees as it streamlines the only thing you get from a brand name PC these days – service. During the 1980s, after the launch of the Walkman and Trinitron, the market crashed. Sony was in crisis. But it weathered the storm, and as most companies that survive global recessions, emerged stronger than ever. Co-founder Akio Morita took the reins in 1989 and set about to diversify Sony’s business, likely as a shelter against future crashes. It was under Morita that Sony’s brand took a hit. New SKUs flooded the market as Sony grew. His venture into producing movies stumbled for a few years. The Sony name no longer held the same cachet it once did. Sony grew during these years, but not in a way that set it up for future dominance. Sir Howard Stringer took over the company in 2005. He was the first foreigner to take over the Japanese company. Attempting to tighten the belt of the bulging company, he cut 9,000 jobs under his tenure. When Kazuo Hirai succeeded Stringer in 2012, Sony’s brand was in tatters. Once holding over 20 percent of the digital imaging market, it had slipped to around 5%. Mobile was the future and at that time Sony was not correctly positioned in the market. Their events

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