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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.
Yeah, I remember when I stopped buying Sony products. Probably about 6 years ago today. My guess is that is probably when their troubles started.
.. not the rule).
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
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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.
Sony has been on a downward slide for quite some time. If they could just get over their "not invented here" mentality and not try to reinvent the wheel every time a new technology comes along. There is nothing wrong with taking something good and simply making it better and more compelling. If Sony made cars it would have square wheels and they would convince you that it was much better that way since you didn't need brakes anymore which by the way were also not invented at Sony.