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Sony Projects Record Losses of $6.4 Billion
redletterdave writes "Not 24 hours after Sony announced it would slash about 10,000 jobs by the end of the year, the Japanese electronics maker announced on Tuesday that it has again doubled its annual net loss to a record $6.4 billion. The new annual estimate is Sony's fourth revision of its original forecast. The company had already more than doubled its loss forecast for fiscal 2011 on April 5 to $2.9 billion, blaming floods in Thailand, poor foreign exchange rates, and a failed partnership with Samsung... Kazuo Hirai, the company's new president and CEO hired 10 days ago, will take 'painful steps' to revive Sony, and will unveil a 'revival strategy' at a Thursday press briefing."
Sony, how is that war against your customers going for you? At some point you need to wake up and realize that your customers are not your enemies, they are your boss.
Wake up Sony, you could be one of the greatest and most profitable companies on earth with a few policies changes.
I hope their losses continue to increase. Die you greedy bastards. Before you do, however, give me back my "Other OS". Not that I'm bitter or anything.
Karma is a bitch, isn't it, Sony? May you go down swiftly. I'd love nothing more after all the hostility and the recent rumours of tying PS4 games to the console with required online verification.
Couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of people.
Hopefully they'll go out of business -- and show the world what happens to you when you treat your paying customers like fools and criminals.
it would seem Sony boycotted themselves on the road to insolvency if they don't wake up to the realities of servicing a web-enabled market of distributed systems. Without security and data integrity, people will leave in droves, because they have no option but to put up with whatever lax security is in place this time.
Without their corporate network model, there is nothing to distinguish Sony's hardware from anyone else's except for proprietary cabling, ports, and overpriced equipment as a result. The PS/3 was the first system they ever delivered that didn't go all out to be proprietary in every way conceivable.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the standardized interconnect of digital protocols.
It stopped mattering who you bought your devices from. They all implement the standards as best they can for a price point. Show me an LCD monitor that doesn't do 1080p nowadays, whether it's embedded in a laptop, a monitor, or a television.
I'm just surprised we seem to have stopped at 1080p as a standard just when LCD manufacturing reliability got to the point where we could produce much higher resolution monitors quite easily.
High end displays all compete on lumens and black levels as well as responsiveness (refresh rate.) As technology was cross-licensed and the manufacturing facilities consolidated, what did anyone think? That brand name would really matter all that much in the long run?
People don't forget stupid marketing mistakes like insisting on reporting the Peak Power Level a Sony amplifier can handle instead of the Continuous Power Level ratings used by high-end amplifier manufacturers.
People don't forget having their credit card information stolen.
People don't forget about being without service for over a month.
People won't buy your products just for the tag line "SO, New York!"
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
While the media wing may not be what is losing money today, it is their Big Media stake that is ruining the electronics company.
From lost focus on developing the best HW for consumers and Spending time on things that electronics enthusiasts have come to hate them for (Rootkits, DRM, supporting MPAA/RIAA).
Being a part of the MPAA/RIAA, Sony electronics now thinks first about DRM and second about customers. So PS3 is the first device to get Cinavia, and yet it still won't play .MKV files. Making it somewhat crappy as a media player.
If Sony hadn't jumped into the media game it would have been better focused on building devices people want, there would have been no Rootkits, no membership in MPAA/RIAA. If that Sony hit hard times, we might actually be sad. But instead Sony Media/Electronics is an unfocussed anti-consumer juggernaut that we get joy seeing go down the tubes.
If rumors are true about PS4, Sony's war on consumers is going full force with zero backward compatibility and technology to block used games.
IMO they deserve to go down the drain.
This.
Back around 2000, I had a Sony Trinitron 21" monitor, a Sony MP3 player, a Sony digital camera, and a Sony HiFi system. Back then, Sony was the best within a reasonable consumer price range. Then LCD monitors came along, and I got a 24" Dell and chucked the Trinitron. Sony was making LCDs too, but Dell was selling the biggest consumer monitors by far, and for several thousand cheaper too than anyone else. The "MP3" player actually required every track to be transcoded into some proprietary format, and was replaced with a generic Taiwanese-made player that cost a digit less and stored ten times more on a generic flash card that cost 1/3rd as much per megabyte as a memory stick. The camera was replaced with a model that had interchangeable lenses and compact flash, because most Sony digital cameras (up until recently) had a single fixed lens and didn't take anything other than memory sticks. I was using the HiFi amp until recently, when I discovered that even though I was using it with only digital inputs, the output has a lot more noise than the headphone jack on the motherboard of my PC, fed by a built-in sound "card" that's probably a single chip that cost $2.
You watch, the same thing is going to happen to Apple too. Oh sure, they're making the best stuff now, but they'll go down the same way in a decade or so. Sure, an iPad is the best tablet on the market at the moment, but in a couple of years Asus or Samsung or whoever will be making something with twice the spec, half the price, and it won't be limited to Apple(r) Approved Quicktime Data Formats(tm) only.
Profiteering at the expense of customer experience = short term gains, long term losses.
mov ah, 4ch
int 21h