Slashdot Mirror
'Sony Needs a Fresh Hit' (bloomberg.com)
Even as Sony's CEO Kazuo Hirai has done a remarkable job over the past five years -- taking bold decisions on the areas the company should be focusing on, and cutting efforts on those that aren't working -- his company desperately needs a fresh hit to boost its revenue and to become relevant in the mind of most, writes columnist Tim Culpan for Bloomberg. An except from his article: According to a company statement Tuesday for investors' day, the key will be to "remain the 'last one inch' that delivers a sense of 'wow' to customers," expand recurring revenue, and pursue new businesses.Those three strategies are closely linked. With TV sales in decline, its Vaio PC business spun off, and its smartphones barely a blip on the radar, Sony's last inch is heavily dependent on the PlayStation. Sony's Game & Network Services business has grown at both the top and bottom lines over the past five years, but the games console business is stuck in time. [...] Sony needs to build a device that will be far more ubiquitous and can appeal to consumers beyond the current male-skewed slowly aging hard-core gamer base. Amazon and Alphabet, with Echo and Home, are two such examples, and Apple will probably follow suit. With its background in audio, video, sensors and entertainment, Sony has all the right parts to make it happen. For the company that invented the Walkman, dreaming up another hit shouldn't be so hard.
get it done right and own mobile.
You could say the same thing to Apple and its stagnating product lineup
For the company that invented the Walkman, dreaming up another hit shouldn't be so hard.
Why not?
Sony had a great hit with the Walkman back in the day. It's a new century and they have to get with the time:
Rootkit
Sure, let's encourage Sony to dream up new ways to screw over customers.
Sony is floundering because their phones were terrible, their TVs were overpriced, and the PS4 is just an underpowered PC with added DRM. With the release of Project Scorpio, the Xbox One is going to be the clearly superior console. The PS4 Pro doesn't even support true 4K!
As far as I'm concerned, Sony can just fade away. Nothing of value would be lost.
Sony lacks the organizational cohesion to deliver on any product line or strategy that crosses business unit boundaries, and an obsession with proprietary formats that makes economies of scale impossible to achieve. The Playstation brand is succeeding in spite of Sony, not because of them.
Maybe Sony can produce a new Spiderman movie, it would sure to be a hit.
Fight Spammers!
It's pretty stupid to cite the Walkman when trying to guess where the future of Sony lies. The Walkman was the vision of one man, the co-founder of Sony who was an engineer and a tinkerer at heart. He was also the man responsable for having pushed Sony to produced the smallest world band radio receiver ever. He didn't care wether it was financially feaseble or not, he said do it and his underlings said ok. Sony of the past (ie pre- Columbia acquisition) was a company that had vision. It was a company made by engineers pushing the envelope. Today Sony is competely different. It's a company driven along by marketing people and other pencil pushers. The engineers are relegated to the dark corners of the room. Seriously, the engineers at Sony are top rate, it's just the that every project they work on is sabotaged by their "entertainment aka Mr-DRM division" all the time. So you end up with crappy overpriced products. It's no wonder the Koreans ate Sony's lunch.
They need to buy Nintendo?
The PS4 and Xbox One are a stone's throw away from being purpose-built HTPCs. The more generic they go, the smaller their value proposition gets.
Music? Films? Electronics? That's kind of like saying Disney needs a hit.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
They are too stuck on vendor lock in and DRM. Instead of relying on consumer loyalty by making good products, they try to rely on forcing customers to only buy Sony stuff whether it meets the needs it not. Back in the day when people built component stereos, people could mix and match and many bought Sony components with others like say a Sony amp and a Dual turntable. If it we're today, Sony would only allow you to use a Sony turntable with a Sony amp. People are sick of that shit.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
OK, so it's not a mass-market product. But their mirrorless camera bodies, in the A7 and new A9 manifestations, should be making Canon and Nikon a little nervous right now.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
For the company that invented the Walkman, dreaming up another hit shouldn't be so hard.
That's oversimplifying just a smidge, methinks. The Walkman was the evolution of the handheld transistor radio, and depended upon the existence of the audio cassette tape; nobody was carrying around a 'portable' 8-track player.
What the author fails to differentiate is the fact that Sony owned the portable media playback market with the Walkman (and largely the Discman) at a time when things were primarily hardware. Everything is software now - games, apps, music, movies...it's all files/programs on a storage medium somewhere, and at the hardware level,it's basically "things that play software and read files" in one shape or another. Competing in that world is rather difficult as differentiating is almost invariably a detriment to the product.
I'm certain there are niche areas being ignored where Sony could own a few very small markets, but having 80% marketshare of a dozen 20,000 unit markets isn't going to make the accountants happy if their metric of success is the Walkman or the Playstation.
I'm not saying that Sony *can't* do it, but blockbuster products have a whole lot of ingredients, not the least of which are both luck and mass appeal. Finding the new thing everyone wants, and introducing it the right way, at the right time, at the right price, is not something that can be decided in Excel. After all, every company is trying to do it.
Sony actually had a prototype MP3 Walkman at some point but was forced to give up on the project due to fighting with their audio division over concerns of consumer copyright issues which resulted in Apple pretty much stealing their lunch in this area. Otherwise I wouldn't be surprised if mp3 walkmans would have existed instead of Ipods. Sony had an amazing line of VPC-Z series laptops which were actually assembled in the US or Japan. I own one that's almost a decade old and it's still on par with modern laptops in performance, weight and size. (Think Razor like laptop) Sadly after I believe a tsunami wiped out their manufacturing facilities and problems with their overall company forced them to sell away their Vaio line. They were one of the first companies also to experiment with hybrid graphics and external gpu cards on their laptops. They also sold one of the first consumer OLED displays that cost more than common sense too. So it's not that their products were bad, it's a lot of bad execution and decisions.
Echo and home arr garbage, destined for the "why the hell did I buy that" bin in the back closet.
As for being stuck in time? The consoles and their PC master race cousins have been pushing tech forward faster than anything else. With the ps3 you had a multiprocessor architecture that was complex as hell, but worked very well. With the ps4, you have in home consumer VR. It streams movies, both from services and one's own network. Integrated live streaming.
I don't know about others, but my ps4s are the entertainment hubs of the house when not on my PC.
Fresh hit usually refers to something like smack or coke or poppers. Msmash, are you dim?
The just need to start manufacturing the Plumbus!
A Plumbus is an all purpose home device. Everyone knows what it does, so there is no reason to explain it.
You're welcome, Sony! ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
that people don't have discussions where they talk about whether Sony is "relevant" or not, before deciding to buy the PS4, or their TVs, or their phones, or whatever.
They are among the companies that make the highest quality electronics products in the world, and if they have what the customer is looking for and at the right price, people will buy it, without considering any kind of "relevance".
This stinks like another shit article trying to get people to think a foreign competitor in the electronics market is going away, to make people stop buying their products.
They could start by lowering the prices of their electronics. Everyone else is eating their lunch.
For the company that invented the Walkman, dreaming up another hit shouldn't be so hard.
What a stupid thing to say. With all of the money Apple has, and a string of products that were amazing sellers, they haven't done much exciting in recent times.
Microsoft did extremely well for itself with it desktop OS and office products. I couldn't even guess how many companies they took over or put under. But I stopped counting how many times they've failed in the mobile phone market. How's Zune selling these days?
How may patents and products did Kodak bring to market over the years? Where are they now? How about GM? They were once the largest car manufacturer in the world. They even had an electric car on the road 20 years ago.
There's an immense amount of luck involved. Just look at things like Crocs, cabbage patch kids,
Sony came to the Walkman (TPS-L2) from the BM-11. But it was not a home market product.
Japanese business used multipart memos back in the 70s for several reasons:
- Even Kanji is too difficult to write for trivial reasons.
- Japanese efficiency was offended by the concept of telling someone to write or even type for you, unless your time was incredibly valuable. Executives might have a dictating secretary, but not their subordinates, and certainly not salarymen.
But Sony did make a variety of tape recorders, and someone got the idea of leveraging their cassette product experience ( probably based on the TC-50) to a truly portable dictating machine for the world market. this was a time when there were none, and Sony's BM series changed the office dictating machine market with high-quality cassette based devices, solving a multitude of problems. Among others, they developed counter-rotating capstan flywheels, solving speed fluctuations when the device was waved around as its attorney-owner waxed philosophic. This also won them a trip on Apollo missions, but not the BM-11 style mechanism, the TC-50.
It didn't take much to adapt the BM-11 into a player-only, the TPS-L2. Original Walkman. I bet they had not predicted the success.
Now, the TPS-L2 was a terrible product. It was a little delicate, literally falling apart in the hands of skaters, runners, and athletes. I was servicing the dictating machines, and the mechanism was virtually identical - I understood it and could fix them, though it gets tiring chasing P1x1.2mm screws around the shop.
Not that the WM series Walkman models were much better, but they improved quickly, as did the dictation machines. Sony developed court reporter versions, ultimately a carousel recorder that held 30 cassettes, a loathsome device. And microcassettes, then of course solid state devices. Walkmen evolved to CD players, Minidisc, and then Netman players nobody cared about.
Sony sure could use a hit like that. But what product today do they make that could be expanded on? Smartphones? No one yet has something revolutionary in that space. TV? Nope. Robots? Yes. Asimo could become something truly useful - but let them figure that out. Hints - Alexa. Roomba. Refrigerators.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I have a PS4 and it's decent, but their obsession pushing "partner" apps on it that I can't remove aggravates me. It leaves a bad impression and I just don't use it much. I used to use my PS3 for Netflix and such, but I've mostly switched to the Apple TV since it has a better UI.
I was in the market for an Android phone, but I never even considered Sony. I figured I'd get one and they'd drop the whole line next month. Nothing seemed compelling. I am sort of considering a mirrorless camera, and they do make some good stuff there. But I'm less sure I even want a standalone camera that costs more than like $400 anymore since I always have my phone with me.
I recently purchased a new 4K TV, and considered Sony. But their prices were significantly higher than everyone else and reviewed no better. That and some were downright hideous. Sony has never had a great reputation for AV receivers, so I never considered them when I purchased one of them either.
Basically, they make overpriced, mediocre stuff. They need to cut headcount and have small teams focusing on innovative products that perform well. And spin off their goofy entertainment empire. That's holding them back even more than high prices. If they did this, they'd have a pretty hard time making it work, though as times have changed.
I don't know, but it works for me.
I mean as far as consumer facing products go (which is really what this article seems to be looking at) Sony is three things: Media (TV*, movie, music studios), console gaming, and consumer electronics. Unfortunately that last market is a walking corpse right now. TVs are a commodity these days, with the difference between high end brands and low end discount brands being trivial to everyone but the home theater enthusiasts. And speaking of home theater, that's going back to being a niche market after growing rapidly in the late 90's and early 00's due to DVD, and Sony isn't even a strong player in it these days anyway. Even plain ol' TVs are falling out of fashion with younger consumers who prefer watching on phones and laptops. Don't ask me to explain that trend; I can't. I don't get it either but it's a reality that electronics companies are going to have to face. Physical media sales (and Sony's lucrative patent licenses) have also fallen off a cliff. Music players and home audio system markets are beyond dead for the average consumer.
Today smart phones are the media consumption device of choice for a growing number of consumers and between Samsung and Apple, that market is locked up tight on the high end, and Sony can't compete on the crowded middle and low end segments. Everything Sony was know for is being consumed by smart phones.
If it wasn't for the PS4 being a success, mainly due to Microsoft fumbling the XBox One and spending less on exclusive titles, Sony as a brand would be practically invisible to consumers. This generation has worked out well for them so far, but they can not count on out-maneuvering Microsoft forever. Microsoft is already fighting back on pricing and their upcoming Scorpio looks ready to trounce the PS4 Pro performance wise. If Microsoft decides to start throwing money at good exclusives again, they can claw back quite a bit of market.
Their only other bright spot they have is their camera division which is doing some really cool stuff in the mirrorless camera market. However that is mostly a niche pro market. Most consumers are perfectly happy to use their smart phone camera.
Honestly in a decade or so I can see them spinning off their consumer electronics business or outright selling it, keeping the gaming and media companies. I just can't see where they can go from here in the electronics business. Of course they still have commercial business units like their camera sensor business. I have no insight there, but again we're really looking at the consumer facing Sony here.
*They have reason to worry here too. Sony makes a number of TV shows for various networks, however due to the new realities of network TV (lower ratings, dropping viewers, and ad rate pushback from buyers) show ownership is playing a bigger and bigger part in what shows get picked up or renewed. Sony doesn't have its own network to fall back on so their only choice is to either field fewer and fewer shows, cut ludicrous first-run fee deals, or (and this is starting to happen now) give up a slice of their back end syndication and foreign rights money. Sony Television makes all their money on syndication deals, this is why you see shows like "The Rules of Engagement" stay on the air for 100 episodes despite poor ratings and odd timeslots. They practically give those final seasons to the networks to get it over the 88 or 100 episodes they need to create a syndication package.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
...that's what Sony needs to do to repair their image.
There are some of us that are still bitter after the PS3 lie (We won't touch your Linux partition, a month later - we'll you better erase that if you want to continue enjoying updates). And the CD rom malware scandal, not to forget the numerous times they've chosen to be proprietary with every thing they create, make and do - leaving the users forced to pay premium prices for stuff they could get for a 1/3rd of the price with better performance.
Yes, Sony has LOT of recovery to do.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
My shelves are replete with PS1 and PS2 games, a few PS3 games. All Sony needs to do to get my money is:
1) Make sure the next console can play them, and
2) Make sure that I can buy game disks that can sit on the shelves next to them that will never, ever require "the cloud" or "authorization" to run.
They're not going to do that, though, because greed has blinded them. And consequently, they're not going to get my money.
Also: Eventually, emulators will appear that can run those games on general purpose hardware. When that happens, Sony's opportunity will be over.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
ROOTKIT.
Haven't forgotten.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
maybe if they could this oled shit off the ground. only been hearing about it for 10+ years.
shift over and make nothing but them, sell them at current lcd-led prices, lose some at first, but recoup the losses by being first.
An easy hit Sony could make is to willingly throw away their obsession with DRM and control. Remember that much of the appeal of tape players (and the Walkman by extension) was mixtapes; not just 'a custom mix of stuff I like' but 'stuff I like that I didn't necessarily buy.' They've never had another consumer electronics win on the level of the Walkman because they locked it all down as much as possible, since it conflicted with their film/music production divisions. Looking at the numbers today, the music industry makes more money from streaming than from sales; if you want to get music without buying it (or even paying for it) there are countless options, not all of which even require internet access (the entire Billboard top 200 for each year since I was born can fit on a $10 flash drive.) Encourage music remixing won't significantly impact their sales.
Mixing video clips is a bit more involved (due to DRM and more complex tools) but still possible. This is something Sony could pounce on, hard. Between their vast film library, the Sony Vegas video editing tools, and a full line of consumer electronics that can be used to view and edit films, they could embrace video remixes. These are popular on youtube, and free video editing tools are low-quality compared to what Vegas can do already; all they need to do is simplify the UI and make it more robust when working with sketchy/pirated videos. It's easy to market: "our movies are DRM-free, use our free software to make a video remix and upload it to Youtube". Those who watch "let's play" videos, Pewdiepie, and are obsessed with Minecraft are the target audience. Their brand differentiation can be "if you buy our stuff, you can do whatever you want with it!" The same can be done with digital music, as well.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Since Sony actively bullied Lik Sang into closing up shop I have not purchased a Sony product. And yes, I realize a one-person boycott does not really do much to Sony, but it at least makes me feel better.
How about keeping the 3d in the TV - given the extra cost the software takes, it is a no brainer and over time it will pay off particularly once games take advantage of it.
After all, if a little hype helps a little, then a ridiculous amount of hype will help a whole lot, right?? Kids just love when you obsolete their brand new 700$ toy before summer is even over.
And sell it at a decent price.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Sell a 100$ controller that allows you to play Sony games on Steam! :)
ps. I really like the sixaxis controller.
Just make my existing things better. Noise cancelling headphones that actually cancel all noise. Not just background hums but ringtones, talking, airport announcements, etc.
Or make me an awesome mouse, or an awesome monitor, or something for my car, or pretty much anything.
But make it awesome for me, not awesome for Sony. For instance I got the Xperia phone with the 6 inch screen. In so many ways that phone was potentially great. Pictures in good light were great, screen was great, OS was responsive. But 16G of ram with the OS and the crap apps that I couldn't delete taking up most of that wasn't. I couldn't put most apps on the SD card, the phone would not let me have the control I wanted, such as blocking all apps from notifying me. For instance I don't want to know "What's New" I don't give a crap about what sony wanted me to know. I don't use voice mail and couldn't block the nearly non stop reminders that I had voicemail.
With a modest amount of small apps and a few pictures I was pretty much always at 85% full; and with 16G that 15% went fast.
I had a sony book reader and it couldn't read most formats. Back to the phone. The mapping app was always jerking around. The Gyros were pretty much always having a spasm attack; bluetooth was no fun at all. The battery was a microbe. It was complete crap. But the worst part was that it was 100% clear that Sony wasn't in my corner. They were more interested in appeasing the app makers and their own marketing department. Good job Sony. That might be the last product I will buy from you. But if you make things that are aimed to please. Such as noise cancelling headphones that don't do things "for my own protection" but really make the sounds from the outside world go away, then I will be back in spades.
Nope. I'm not going to buy Sony Anything(tm) again. Bought a very expensive video camera, but it has Sony proprietary crap that hasn't (and isn't) being updated or upgraded. I can now buy much smaller, nicer cameras for pennies on the dollar. I bought a PS3. OtherOS is disabled, it barely plays videos anymore, can't upgrade the memory. I never was caught up in the rootkit, but seeing what happened when people tried to fix some of the problems on their own PS3's, I got sick and tired of SONY! I can buy anything else, and its at least as good but 1/4 the price. Oh, and no lawyer is going to come after me for doing something with what I bought and paid for, that Sony doesn't like. So no more SONY. Die if you must, but if you do, do it quickly and quietly. Thanks.
PSVR is selling well and now has the #2 game on the market; Farpoint. If they keep going in that direction they might just win the VR game.
If I had one more inch, I could certainly "wow" someone...
How about installing more malware on computers you sell.