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Sony Entertainment Head Steps Down
New submitter Mephistophocles writes "Japan Times reports today that Sony Entertainment Chief Tim Schaaf has stepped down. Schaaf's division has recently drawn the ire of users and governments alike after multiple hacks which resulted in the theft of millions of users' personal information. Schaaf joined Sony after a stint at Apple, and had ambitious plans for unifying the end-user's entertainment experience on Sony products, as well as having some big words for how to help out Sony's music division. Tim will be replaced by Andrew House, currently of Sony's Game Division. One wonders — is this a continued sign of deterioration in Sony's Entertainment house?"
I haven't liked Sony for years but with this move I might give Sony a second chance.
Why give them a second chance? Has the board and entire executive arm been replaced? If not, what makes you think that those DRM hugging, root kit installing, standards breaking overcharging swine have changed their ways? They just found a scapegoat for their shrinking market share. Someone had to take the fall, and considering it's been a 5+ year dive, I guess he ran out of flunkies to blame.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
...from stealth DRM spyware on your Music CDs, to shitty closed-ecosystem type policies for PS3 is that SONY - once a "Superbrand" - is crumbling in the eyes of consumers. No big loss, really. Samsung does everything Sony once did better, and at lower prices. Maybe Samsung could be persuaded to create an Android or Linux powered game console that frees people from the inevitable "horror" that will be Playstation 4? Go on Samsung; Take that "final leap" to challenging Sony in "all things consumer electronics"...
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
After Howard Stringer, the Sony-BGM DRM stooge got replaced, this is another sign that Sony is continuing to move back to nice electronics and away from the walled-garden approaches (DRM, mini-disc/beta-max?) that made Sony products acquire so much grossness brand-wise.
"There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell them." ~ Louis Armstrong
If companies don't start treating the Used market as competition, it will kill them
They are competing by moving to digital sales and by dis-incentivising used game purchases by requiring one-use activation codes to gain access to online features. In other words, they're either too stubborn or too lacking in creativity to develop a real model of competition, so they're just trying to use their weight to crush used sales.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
Words of wisdom: When you refuse to fish anywhere but a sewer, all you'll ever catch are turds.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
The guy is being replaced by someone from the Games Division. Surely the tinkerer suing, DRM purveying, Linux removing and just general customer fucking guys that brought us the overly expensive PS3 will do very differently at the helm of the company.
That, if 10 people are willing to buy the game at $60, 20 would be willing to buy it at $50, 30 at $40, etc.
That's all well and good if they are out to maximize sales, but what they really want is to max out their profit and to get profit you need to take into account the cost to produce the games (and a bunch of other stuff as well). So if the cost to create them is $40 and they sell 10 of them for $60, they've made $200 profit on revenue of $600. If they sell 20 at $50, they made $200 profit on revenue of $1000. If they sell the 30 at $40 then they break even, and it goes down hill from there.
It's easy to say they'll sell more if they lower the price, but without knowing what it costs to create the game you can't know where the optimum price point is. They know what it costs to create and they, and all the other game manufacturers out there, spend boat loads of money figuring out the exact price point to maximize their profits.
How long has it been and people are still posting BS about the hack? The passwords were hashed, the CC info wasn't compromised and the server was up to date at the time of the hack (there's a google cache somewhere proving the version numbers). The personal details weren't encrypted but that's the same with most sites (besides which, if your server is compromised, so is the decryption key)
I'm a Sony employee. Note that Tim Schaaf was head of Sony Network Entertainment, which is a distinct entity from the movie and music groups. Sony Pictures*, Sony Music**, and Sony Computer Entertainment (the videogames) are all direct reports to the parent. Sony Network Ent. is strictly the Playstation Network and some other stuff, mainly services that compete with iTunes/Roku/Unbox.
The entertainment divisions are all distinct with regard to Sony Corp. There is no all-encompassing "Entertainment division."
* (incl. Columbia Pictures, Sony Classics, Screen Gems, Sony Pictures Animation, Sony Imageworks, the distribution network, the studio, Crackle.com)
** (incl. Arista, RCA, Columbia, Gracenote)
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
The PS3 allowed you to install linux when it first came out. People obvious abused it in bucket loads to play pirated games. When the PS3 came out, compared to the cost of a blu-ray it wasn't sooo bad. Sony doesn't publish PC games, so I can't speak on that... Overall,... I'm indifferent, these guys (Sony) have almost unlimited IT spending budgets typically, I'd blame the CIO before the CEO on what happened. There's probably some Sr. Sys Admin under there who thought s/he knew security better than they did. A NOC never killed anyone either as far as I know.
Country music albums, life insurance, Adam Sandler movies, flow cytometry machines, Wheel of Fortune, and virtual swag for your online avatar. All of these things are Sony. (Oh yeah and they make consumer electronics too.)
You can only integrate these businesses so much -- collaboration between units has the effect of multiplying the number of managers you need, because pooling resources inevitably creates more contention and need for arbitration, and makes it more difficult to analyze who's making profitable decisions and who isn't. Think of it like the Unix principle: each businesses does one thing well, and they're connected to each other with clean interfaces. If you have two programs that parse JSON, it doesn't necessarily follow that they should share the same address space or kernel resources to do that, or even that they should use the same libraries. Similarly, a recording engineer at Sony Pictures Studios in Los Angeles, doesn't necessarily make an engineer at Arista in Nashville redundant.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
If Google or Apple started acquiring locomotive manufacturers, medical device companies, stock brokerages and frozen yogurt chains, this would begin to be a comparison. Sony's a conglomerate, Apple and Google are quite specialized. Also you're passing judgement on Sony's entire divisional structure based on their inability to execute a GoogleTV STB and an Android tablet, both classes of devices that every manufacturer has managed to screw up. Your complaints about the tablet could just as easily be applied to ASUS or any old KIRF.
I'm not saying that Sony's organization actually works, but integrating Google Docs with Android is an utterly different class of problem from integrating a musical act with a movie studio, video game developer and distribution infrastructure. The one just involves some code, while the other involves people, lots and lots of people.
If I were you I'd hold off on singing the praises of Google's synergy until we saw how the Motorola merger shook out. As it is, it looks like they simply don't know how to run the company that actually makes things, and are letting it wither, loosing billions of dollars in the process.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.