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

Re:I hate forced subjects

[ProppaT]

I'm glad you got modded insightful instead of funny. It's the blatent truth of the issue. Ken is a crazy, crazy man with little to no business since. Sony is running off the steam of their name at this point. Hopefully the up in commers in the corporation will have a little more sense or there's going to be little cash to run off of in the future. As it sits now, SCE is the company's only real profit (other divisions are taking losses).

Frankly, after my run of faulty Sony products (tally of broken sony equipment: 1 psx, 2 ps2's, 2 discmen, 1 dvd player), they lost a potential PS3 customer until they prove to me that the hardware is solid or the price drops substantially. I know I'm not the only person who feels burnt by their QA either. Despite all the other craziness going on in the company, the first real step would be stepping their hardware quality up to what it used to be in Sony's glory days.