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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."
"free Ken up to do the vision thing"
translation: Stay out of the way and shut the hell up, crazy man.
Summary of TFA: We don't really know what's going on, but we've got a few clues so we'll wildly extrapolate forward from those.
In other news, no tea in the vending machine this morning - this probably means that Asia is now underwater and establishing a subsea uber-race.
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
There's no meat here at all. No discussion as to how to get themselves out of the hole, or at the very least stop digging new ones. As I see it, it's the friction between the different divisions that's causing all the problems. Useless MP3 players (when they should be OWNING that market), lagging media sales (DVD and CD), bad press due to various stumblings, PS3 waiting for Blu-Ray, and more, have caused the once-mighty Sony to stumble. They've managed to alienate all but the most rabid fans with their stupid and uncoordinated moves.
Either Sony has to REALLY reorganize and focus on what they do best, or they need to give the CEO carte blanche to make the tough choices. Toes will be stepped on, feelings will be hurt, but if they don't do this things won't be any better by this time next year (even if the PS3 is in good supply).
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
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.