What the Sony Reshuffling Actually Means

Newsweek's N'Gai Croal steps up this morning with some interesting analysis of the Sony re-organization that occurred late last month. Mr. Croal points out the difficulty of understanding the machinations of a notoriously tight-lipped foreign company, and attempts to look at the executive movements from the games business view. From the article: "Here's what's on SCE's plate at this very moment: three product lines that must be managed over the next five to six years (PS2, PSP and PS3); two more product lines that are almost certainly already in the planning stages (PS4 and PSP2); an online service, an online store, operating systems and system updates for each of the post-PS2 machines; and one of the world's largest game studio operations. Given that workload, Sony desperately needed to free Ken up to do the vision thing, and groom the next generation to run SCE on a day-to-day basis, much like Microsoft did when Bill Gates ceded operational control of Microsoft to Steve Ballmer. So while we have absolutely no visibility into whether this evolution was initiated by Kutaragi or by Stringer, it strikes us as precisely the right move to help ensure the future health of the PlayStation business."

Comments

I hate forced subjects

[Dance_Dance_Karnov]

"free Ken up to do the vision thing"

translation: Stay out of the way and shut the hell up, crazy man.

Big ships turn slowly

[PingSpike]

Larger, more established companies tend to change slowly. They tend to be risk averse even though they're actually better equiped to weather potential failures then their smaller competitors. And in situations like this, divisions within the company can be crippled by their sister divisions. The video game division doesn't just have to compete with nintendo and microsoft, it has to compete with other divisions within sony. The video game division says they need to keep their costs down, but the other division needs to push that new expensive bluray format so that gets stuck on there for instance.

Sony seems obsessed with trying to get the market to adopt one of their proprietary media formats. They tried just using their name to push it, and then they've started trying to piggyback on the success of some of their other products to get it adopted. Neither has had much success. It'd be a great revenue generator, but consumers don't want to pay the extra cost and competitors are right there to offer an alternative. Give it up already! They aren't helping blu-ray be adopted, they're hurting their PS3.

Re:Big ships turn slowly

[thatguywhoiam]

Sony seems obsessed with trying to get the market to adopt one of their proprietary media formats.

Even just 3 years ago, I would have agreed vigorously. Now I'm not so sure.

As you mentioned above, these big corps steer like a Buick. Changes take a long time to trickle down. But somewhere between the death of MiniDisc and the PSP, Sony has changed tack.

They no longer sell ATRAC3, their proprietary audio codec. New devices only support this for legacy reasons The PSP, while locked down as far as executable code goes, does support standard things like JPG / PNG / MPEG-2 / MPEG-4. Even the Sony Ericsson phones only play MP3/AAC. Nothing DRM'd.

And now we see that the PS3 has multiple card readers (not just MemoryStick) a Linux bootloader provided and supported by Sony, a standard HDD that is removable without voiding the warranty, and a regular power plug (they used to rape you for those 'special' plugs, remember that?) Say what you will, but these things were basically unthinkable for Sony a few years ago.

I don't know exactly where they are going with this but these are certainly encouraging signs.