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Sony Slashes 10,000 Jobs
redletterdave writes "Sony will cut about 10,000 jobs, which equates to about six percent of its global workforce, by the end of the year. The move comes after the Tokyo-based electronics firm more than doubled its loss forecast on April 5 to $2.9 billion, and the recent hiring of a new CEO, Kazuo Hirai, on April 1. Hirai looks to downsize Sony and pivot the company in a new direction to get out of the red for the first time in four years. The company will reportedly sell off its chemical products division, cutting about 3,000 workers in the process, and also make cuts within its small and midsize LCD operations. Sony did not say if it would cut these jobs in Japan, abroad, or both."
Just wanted to note this before slashdotters get all jiggly about the evilness of PS3 and Sony's music divisions. They are actually Sony's most profitable divisions, and it seems like Sony wants to cut out the less profitable divisions like chemical products. PS4 is already in the production and as noted on Slashdot before, will contain even more DRM. So this is not really "news for nerds" at all, as it's completely different divisions of Sony that will get the cut.
I understand they're still looking for rootkit developers.
They'll close their DRM-peddling division. Of course with my luck Sony will be repositioning themselves as a DRM company
Maybe they should fire the shovelware writers that write the stuipid applets that sys inthe syste tray that get installed when ever you install a device driver for a sony peripheral.
Gee, I install the SONY monitor and now I have a systray applet eating CPU time and whatnot and while it supposedly is supposed to help me control the monitor but it leads itself in the tray so it doesn't "Take so long to startup" when I run it that one time to adjust the monitor settings.... When running it from the start menu and waiting an extra 2 seconds for it to load is going to take more time than the cumulative 30 minutes over the lifetime of the PC that is wasts because it slowing everything else down with it's CPU usage and memory consumption....
Sorry, I just hate installing drivers and having to install stuipid shit that I have to go back and remove after every damn driver install. Drivers are "supposed" to be only the driver, I don;t need no damn systray applet for USB Hub, Printer, scanner, DVD writer and LCD monitor.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
I wonder how many millions of dollars bonus the CEO will earn by cutting the workforce so drastically...
The company will reportedly sell off its chemical products division
So what is sony chemical division, like if you buy Sony-brand acetone then you can only use it in Sony-brand test tubes? Sony-brand chemical storage only holds Sony-brand hydrochloric acid that costs 10x as much as commodity HCl? That's how they run their electronic division...
I LOL when I thought of it, but I'm seriously betting they sell a line of completely incompatible ground-glass-joint glassware for chemists. Like instead of standard 14/20 taper, theirs is probably 16.335/23.235, that spec is trademarked and copyrighted up the wazoo, and costs 10 times as much as normal glassware and they aggressively sue anyone trying to use it with normal taper glassware. (On a slightly related note, what is it with you european chemists, on this side of the pond we use two tapers, "big and small (14/20 is the small)" yet we're taught that you guys have something like 10 mutually incompatible tapers... whats up with that... I would think you metric EU people would simply have the one taper to rule them all but no we're told you've got a dozen in common use)
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
There was a time - in the 80s, 90s - when Sony was perhaps THE company to buy quality products from. A Sony CRT TV or VCR was sturdy, reliable, and offered a high quality (visual) experience for the time. A Sony Walkman or Discman was, again, a quality product that was most usable and dependable. A Sony Betamax or VHS home-video camera, and later its much smaller (digital) handycams would, similarly, give you a quality home video experience. Then, at some point, Sony started going downhill in terms of corporate philosophy: Putting proprietary, expensive & incompatible Sony memory-sticks into Sony digital cameras? Selling 60GB HDD videocameras with no manual focus-ring, and not entirely reliable always-on autofocus? Putting DRM on music CDs, in PC Games, and all over the Playstation 3 experience? Branding handycam lenses "Zeiss Vario-Tessar" to lure buyers, even though the lenses are manufactured by Sony, not Zeiss (Sony just bought the right to call them "Zeiss" lenses)? Selling large, heavy, expensive LCD TVs while advertising that they include the fantabulous "Bravia Engine" (a collection of very, very mediocre video sharpening/upscaling/color/contrast algorithms). Sony Vaio laptops that are seriously expensive, while offering only very mediocre hardware specs? Killing HD-DVD, then failing to offer a decent (low) price on BluRay players and movies. Being a main player in demanding that all HD content be played back through HDMI cables - what was so bloody "wrong" with analogue HD cables? While Sony was slowly loosing its "focus on the user experience" and on "end-user and buyer sattisfaction" in particular, once far lesser brands like Korean Samsung zipped onto the scene with products that look, perform and, overall, please better, and without Sony's premium pricing attached. I'm sorry that Sony has fallen so low. It used to be my go-to brand for consumer electronics. But Sony isn't a company that learns from experience. I personally think that Playstation 4 will flop badly - at least initially - if Sony persists in forcing hardcore DRM and always-on-internet-to-play type shit on PS4 gamers. Wake up, Sony! Wake up before your corporate-crapfest-philosophy costs another 10,000 or 20,000 Sony employees their jobs. (Will Sony actually wake up? Not a chance, I think. PS4 will quite likely wind up being a horrid DRM fest that may actually drive some gamers back to gaming on a PC...)
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
Most of their customer base never cared. Even when it was plastered on the mainstream news, the average reaction was "well, that was naughty of them".
The relatively small number of us who do care are a tiny blip on their profit statements. Yes, some of us influence big purchasing decisions at our workplaces.. but realistically it doesn't matter to them.
Remember, when the PSN got hacked.. the absolute loudest cry wasn't about personal info getting stolen, it was that the network was down and games wouldn't work. This is Sony's customer base and they know it.
Playstation and music are still very profitable sections of Sony.. and I suspect they will keep right on doing more of what they've been doing. This just sounds like them cutting out some of the less profitable chunks of their business and not Sony getting what _should_ be coming to them.
So, downsizing their customer base didn't work anymore?
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
How is your war on users going? Is that working out for you the way you expected? Perhaps, just perhaps, your customers are not your enemies? Think about this please, you could be such a great company if not for a small handful of policies.
http://www.sonycid.jp/en/products/ (I'm sorry to post something informative rather than something bashing Sony and/or hilarious "jokes".)
I am going to have to disagree with your opinion. From what I have read from other articles, Sony is losing money on LCDs and is trying to get out of the market.
Manufacturing LCD is very capital intensive. That is, the initial outlay to build the plant is high. So while Sony is making money on the variable costs (i.e. the cost of materials, labor, etc) is can’t justify all of the capital that’s tied up to it. It can’t sell it because there a glut of LCD manufacturing capacity right now.
So they are turning it into a Zombie. They won’t invest any more money in the plant, and they don’t expect anything from it, but they will just let it putter along as long as they can cover the variable costs.
I say we don't move on until at least one Sony exec serves serious prison time for using their music CDs as a vector to install a virus onto users PCs.
An ordinary hacker would have served time, but because Sony is a super-criminal with countless victims they remain free. Not acceptable.
It was despicable but it was just one division (a joint venture at that) and it was 7 years ago so I think it is time to move on.
I'm not going to "move on" when they still have the same exact attitude: harm your customers (with DRM) to stop the big evil pirates. I'm tired of collective punishment. One recent and obvious example of this mentality is the removal of OtherOS (some people like to justify it by saying that harming only a few of your customers somehow makes it okay). Another is the planned DRM for PS4.
No, they haven't changed. At all. They had no reason to.
I was actually just thinking, 6%? Yup, that would just about account for anyone left with a shred of morality in the company.
Sony's most profitable business? Life insurance. I kid you not.
"Going to war without the French is like going deer hunting without your accordion." ~General Norman Schwarzkopf
Geeks are the most selfish and entitled people on the planet.
You've obviously never met a politician, or executive type.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
A lot of them are flat out sociopaths.
An armchair psychologist says it, so it must be true. If it's that easy to be diagnosed as a sociopath, then perhaps that's what 99% of humans are. "Oh, you have a different sense of humour than me? Sociopath."
We'll be waiting for your Sony bash
Sony bash hasn't been around since PS3 firmware 3.21.
Some people seem to. It doesn't in 99% of cases.
But you know what? I don't care if it does or doesn't. I believe it's wrong to hurt your customers trying to hurt pirates. It makes me wonder how anyone can defend this practice.
I heard that origin was an order of magnitude worse than Steam. And I highly doubt it's anywhere on the level of Sony's rootkit, as he implied it was (I know you didn't say it was).
One thing I don't understand, though, is why Steam isn't just a platform for selling games. Kind of like Good Old Games. They sell you the game, and after that, it's completely yours. No DRM, and the games wouldn't be tied to Steam. Although, you could still have the option of tying it to Steam (not sure if that would have any benefits, though, so I don't know if that would be useful).