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'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.
Maybe Sony can produce a new Spiderman movie, it would sure to be a hit.
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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're only proprietary formats until everyone else adopts them
No, they're still proprietary at that point too. They may no longer be considered "non-standard" if everyone adopts them as standard, but that doesn't make them any less proprietary.
The worst part about that list is that many of the items on it were superior in many ways to their competitor, but due to Sony's greed failed to catch on.
Sony has come up with some great products, they just need to realize that nobody wants hardware that isn't compatible with anyone else's, and none of the competitors are willing to pay the kind of royalties Sony wants, even if the end product is better.
Beyond that though, Sony did at one point in the past stand for quality. There's a reason people wanted a real Walkman and not a rip-off. The Walkman was simply a better machine. Same with many of their products. Now though the quality of Sony stuff isn't "bad", but it's also no better than any of their competitors, but they often try to charge a premium for the brand. The brand just isn't worth a premium any more.