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Sony's New CEO To Look Beyond Hardware
angry tapir writes "Sony's new CEO says the company needs to move on from its hardware roots. From its inception, the company has defined itself through its gadget lines — Walkman, Vaio, Cyber-shot, PlayStation — but incoming CEO Kazuo Hirai, who will officially lead the company from April, says Sony must now focus more on the software and platforms they access. He said he wants to model the company after its successful PlayStation gaming business, which he helped turn around, where 'hardware drives software, and software drives hardware, and it's all tied in by the network.' Sony is forecasting nearly US$3 billion in losses for the fiscal year through March."
On the PlayStation, yes. There you have no choice. But on the PC? Especially with all the good press from the Sony software installed on PCs in the past... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal http://techreport.com/discussions/13096 They will have a hard time overcoming this with a lot of users. It is actually a factor in the hardware losses they have had.
Not to mention that they have zero consumer trust in their software, after two different rootkit fiascos.
No, what you're describing is the public perception. What he's describing is the reality. Most of the big-name "computer manufacturers" aren't really hardware manufacturers. Apple's laptops are designed and made by Quanta. Apple gives them some guidelines and requests some modifications, but the design and manufacturing is done by Quanta. Ever wonder why some of the HP laptops look a lot like MacBooks? It's not because HP is copying Apple. Quanta is also the primary original design manufacturer for HP. Literally the same Taiwanese people who designed and manufactured the Macbooks also designed and manufactured those HPs.
The same goes for other products. The iPod and iPad by now I think most people know are made by Foxconn. Who designs them is still uncertain. The big name sellers and the OEMs/ODMs are very reluctant to publicly discuss who makes what. The CPUs in their mobile devices are made by Samsung, though it looks like Apple is burning that bridge and is trying to design their very own ARM CPU for their next gen products.
So Apple is essentially a middle-man. Someone who comes up with an idea, hires a outside companies to work out the design details and manufacturing, then assembles and imports it, and sells it under their brand name. A parts assembler. A marketing company. Many other companies you may think are hardware companies do this too. IBM used to make their Thinkpads in-house, but as near as I can tell Lenovo has outsourced most of their laptop production to ODMs. A lot of Sony's low-end and mid-grade laptops are made the same way. Dell just orders the different parts of their desktop computers, and assembles them before shipping it off to you.
But some of them do have their own design, fab, and production facilities. Dell designs their own motherboards and cases (and tests them pretty extensively - it's extraordinarily difficult to put together a custom PC that's as quiet as a Dell business desktop). Sony's high-end laptops are designed and built at their facilities in Japan. The same for the sensors for their cameras, which they also sell to other companies (most of the other digital camera "manufacturers" use Sony sensors - a huge opportunity Kodak missed because they didn't have silicon fabbing experience). So they're very much a hardware company.
I'd characterize Apple as a software and online services company first (OS X, iOS, and iTunes are their bread and butter), marketing/assembling second, and hardware a distant third.