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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.
That Sony electronics will have greater control over their products?
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.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
The recording side of Sony had no trouble communicating to the MP3 player side the fact that they should do what they can to restrict users from copying songs freely. Stupid things like forcing users to convert from MP3 to ARTAC and limiting them from copying a song more than 3 times (which was easy enough to circumvent) still leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth 5 years since I received a Sony "MP3" player for Christmas that at the time was worth $300.
This is just the first byproducts of the management shakesups that happened in Sony at the beginning of this year (new CEO, recognition the company was poorly coordinated, etc). It has nothing to do with Microsoft.
This is what happens when one half of your company is fighting with (and suing) the other half: either decide to sell music and movies, decide to sell mp3 and DVD burners, or find something other than an arms race to struggle to create/defeat unbreakable protection schemes.
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
No, it's just Sony trying to maximize profits in order to please the shareholders. Biggest source of expense in a company is usually payroll.
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Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
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.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
wtf man?
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)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
It isn't so much that Sony is "hard-headed" but rather than they don't seem to be able to learn from their mistakes. One mistake Sony seems to have made repeatedly is to try to market proprietary media formats. All the examples you mention are examples one or both of two mistakes:
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.
The thing is Sony gets a lot of support in Japan for these formats. It's like Americans buying American cars. They're probably more than a little blinded by the success at home and need a central power structure who can look outward and realize the future lies in open standards for the whole world, packaged in the nicest possible way. They can take a lesson from Apple.
a major overhaul of management in June
Should be read as "bonuses for management, layoffs for everyone else".
Five years ago, just about everything electronic I had was Sony. Nothing I've bought for the past five years has been Sony. Somewhere along the line they droped the ball, product-wise. CD players, DVD players, TVs, telephones, clock radios, etc., etc., they just slipped back in bang-for-the-buck, mostly to Korean companies. Sony just can't seem to make the price-point without cutting quality.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
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.
They just can't admit that their PSP was a failure and that Blu-Ray (aka BetamaxDisc) and the PlayStation3 are going to bankrupt them.
/rant
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,
What's with everybody bashing Sony for "propritary" formats. It seems rather hyprocritical being that the alternatives are also proprietary formats as well. VHS, SD, MP3, AAC, etc are all proprietary formats that require licencing fees and royalties just like Sony's formats. The only difference is that they mananged win their respective format wars, and losing format is usually then marked as "proprietary".
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).