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Sony Is Done Working For Peanuts in the Hardware Business, New CEO To Detail Shift Away From Gadgets (bloomberg.com)
Kenichiro Yoshida, who took over as chief executive officer in April, is set to unveil a three-year plan on Tuesday that embraces Sony's growing reliance on income from gaming subscriptions and entertainment. From a report: The transition is already happening: even though the company sold fewer hardware products such as televisions, digital cameras, smartphones and PlayStation consoles in the year through March, it was able to post record operating profit. It's a tectonic shift for a company built on manufacturing prowess. Sony popularized transistor radios, gave the world portable music with the Walkman and its TVs were considered top-of-the-line for decades. With the rise of Chinese manufacturing, making and selling gadgets has become a business with razor-thin profit margins. Investors have applauded the transformation that's been under way since Kazuo Hirai took over as CEO in 2012, with the shares climbing more than five-fold amid a turnaround.
Huh... unfortunately the change is a bit late for Sony Online Entertainment which was sold off in 2015 and renamed "Daybreak Games". Then came the layoffs.
Samurai say much ress ovah-head to manufactah nussing.
It's a tectonic shift for a company built on manufacturing prowess.
Sony was never really a manufacturing juggernaut though they certainly were/are competent at it. Manufacturing was always a means to an end for them. Their core competency was in engineering hardware historically and they were quite good. They ran into problems with software which to this day they still struggle with on many of their product lines - at least the bits of it that interface the customer. A lot of this was because they historically had a culture of hardware engineers who didn't really grok software. That's changed somewhat in recent years for some of their divisions though not all.
Sony is/was quite competitive on non-commodity hardware or hardware where they have patent protection. For example their mirrorless cameras are really good and they supply the camera sensors to much of the industry for digital cameras. (for example the iPhone has a Sony camera sensor in it) I use one of their A9 mirrorless cameras and it's a remarkable bit of tech. (though the software interface still sucks)
Sony popularized transistor radios, gave the world portable music with the Walkman and its TVs were considered top-of-the-line for decades
And all that was engineering prowess, not manufacturing prowess. Sony never was a low cost manufacturer so they usually had to compete towards the high end of the market. None of that has changed. The company has also diversified quite a lot. Sony is a huge insurance and financial services company. They also are big in entertainment (games, movies, etc) They're best known for consumer electronics but that provides increasingly less of their revenue anymore.
I owned two Trinitron TVs. One got color-spotty in the upper-left corner (sorry STTNG) and was so warm that our cat made a bee-line for it whenever we turned it on. The other lost the ability to controls its own volume and spent much of its days with foam and pads of paper duct-taped to the side speakers to regulate the sound. (It's a wonder I had a girlfriend back then.)
So, is Sony "good" hardware? Meh...maybe for the time, but quality enough to trust the name 25 years later? Nope.
TFA shows a nice graph of their hardware sales by year. It's interesting to note that smartphone sales dominated until around 2015. Incidentally, 2015 was the year they came out with their first flagship phone featuring a fingerprint sensor (Xperia Z5). Smartphone sales started declining ever since. I wonder if it has anything to do with their moronic decision to limit fingerprint sensor functionality to the EU market only. It will be interesting to see how the Xperia XZ2 does considering it's the first flagship they've made to have a globally functional fingerprint sensor.
...when your product has become a commodity, you have three choices:
1) try to buy your way to control of the market. If there are high capital barriers to entry in the field, and you already have a lot of the costs invested, you have a chance. As a 90% dominant player, you might be able to undercut/destroy any new entrants before they can get established (or better, make it clear that you COULD do this to intimidate any investors contemplating getting into your market enough to dissuade them from even trying).
2) upscale: use your ostensible experience and sunk investments with the product to deliver more product for the same price. If they can make a walkman that plays mp3's, you offer one that plays mp3 AND will pull content from the web/youtube. If they copy that, you offer one that's waterproof, etc.
3) sell your brand and GTFO. Parlay what is ostensibly a good reputation into short-term cash by licensing your brand to one of the better commodity producers for a fee. They get to make their shitty knock-offs but put your label on it so they can gain extra sales (and possibly a slight margin) trading on your name/history, while you just get $ for doing nothing. Then you can fire your workers, sell your factories, and make serious money with no capital employed at all as long your reputation is worth something for them to pay for it, which is probably a while.
The problem with choice 1 is that sometimes it's simply not possible, particularly when your competition is in China. ...which is why we see #3 as the very common option. For example, I've seen that result for a certain brand of food products - a company with a deep historical reputation as pretty much become little more than an office managing the licensing of their brands.
The problem with choice 2 is that with electronics the capital investment is rarely a big barrier to entry (unless you're talking like chip-fabs or something). A quick reverse-engineering (or even simply knowing something is conceptually possible) is enough to allow low-cost commodity competitors to quickly catch up to you without bearing much of your research/dev costs.
-Styopa
They're getting beat up in the hardware market because they didn't invest in quality control. Sony used to be a premium brand. Rather than invest in high quality products, they tried to force vendor lock-in through a variety of boondoggles. This was a poor investment choice as only one of these technologies took off (Blue-ray, but only kinda). Had they spent that much money on quality, they could charge a premium over the competition.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
It was those yellow walkmans in the 90s. Those where like a 90s iPhone, every kid had to have one.
You do realize that every iPhone has a Sony camera in it?
Also I'd suggest that the Playstation at least at one point qualified as a hit gadget.
And even if done correctly like most of their Minidisc machines, always somehow crippled, especially software-wise.
Mostly random stuff.
That was the '80s. The '90s were about Minidisc.
Mostly random stuff.
And here I thought that Sony just bought a stake in Peanuts from DHX Media.
http://money.cnn.com/2018/05/14/news/companies/peanuts-dhx-sony/index.html
I completely agree. I disagree with with the AC grandparent who said that Sony hardware was overpriced and subpar - I felt like you always got what you paid for. Sure, they made some crap - but they also made stuff that was a good value. Their mid-range home theater stuff was always pretty nice.
But back to your point, even when I was super happy with my Sony product, it would have some weird non-standard thing that kept it from being perfect. For instance, I had a very nice Sony digital camera - but it used a MemoryStick even though standard storage had caught up in speed by that point. Ditto with a Sony-branded Palm organizer - MemoryStick was completely unnecessary in that product. I still can't believe how they dropped the ball with MiniDisc - they had, almost by accident, the best technology to take advantage of the MP3 craze... and they handed it to others.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I think this is nothing new, and began when Sony dumped the Vaio PC line and decided if you can't sell people premium hardware for profit anymore why bother to do it.
The issue with this assertion is that the Vaio line wasn't actually premium hardware. At best, it was nicely-decorated mediocre hardware sold at a premium price. At worst, they were just dreadfully crappy (albeit pretty) machines.
The color spottiness probably had to do with proximity to a strong magnet, like a stereo speaker.
Yep. The Vaio line were easily breakable hardware with poor driver support. I don't remember them fondly.
Services are lame. Sell cool hardware or die, Sony. Be who you are.
I had a Sony Discman that was great, but those bastards have been dead to me since the rootkit nastiness in 2005. I wouldn't trust a BASIC Hello World program from those bastards.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
I hung in there with HiMD but after a while Sonic Stage just became stale; the future was clearly MP3 on flash memory. I do miss the long playing times, simple interface, and good sound quality. Even my MZ-1 was able to drive full size cans to nearly hearing-damage levels.
Mostly random stuff.
I disagree with with the AC grandparent who said that Sony hardware was overpriced and subpar - I felt like you always got what you paid for. Sure, they made some crap - but they also made stuff that was a good value. Their mid-range home theater stuff was always pretty nice.
I think part of their strategy, at least with home theater gear, was to make certain items quality and others with planned obsolescence, and hope you buy the crap gear to keep your system "all Sony" - and it worked on me. I bought a Sony receiver/amp in the mid-90s which still works fine to this day, but I had two 90's-era Sony CD changers crap out after 2-3 years each, one VCR and one cassette deck die after a few more years. I swore off buying any of their components again after that.
Between that and the other stuff they've pulled which didn't affect me personally (the CD rootkit thing, the retraction of the alternate OS on PS2s), I feel glad that they're getting out of hardware. They've in general treated their customers like shit.
www.gaiageek.com
Companies continue to find that making stuff doesn't make money.
There are a lot of very successful companies that are going to be astonished to hear that. I don't really get idiots like this who think there is not money in manufacturing. China and Germany and Japan and yes the USA are hugely successful at making stuff and being profitable doing it. Lots of money in manufacturing. The US manufacturing sector alone is worth about $3 Trillion annually. The notion that there is no money in making stuff is complete nonsense. There is and always will be money to be had in making stuff.
What happens when nobody makes anything anymore?
What color is the sky on your planet?
or the cat whizzed on it...
I was a pretty big fan of Trinitron.
There really wasn't anything close in terms of TV quality for quite a while.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I have to admit I'm slightly bothered by the trend, overall, in shifting away from building physical things to selling virtual stuff.
Right now, lots of companies are finding it's easier to make good profits by selling subscriptions to stream content to people than it is to actually BUILD something tangible, and then deal with shipping it out to be sold, handle repairs of the broken units that come back, etc. etc. (Look at IBM and their selloff of their entire notebook computer division to Lenovo, in favor of becoming a service provider. Even companies like HP basically split the company down the middle so they could detach sales of hardware from all the service-related stuff they wanted to sell.)
The problem is -- a lot of these businesses have been engineering and building consumer electronics goods for a LONG time. So now, that talent gets jettisoned and we have to hope it goes someplace else useful. A lot of stuff seems to just fall to, "Ah well ... someone in China will build and sell it!", resulting in sub-par quality electronics junk. At best, it's only successful because it's a complete ripoff of the engineering originally done by one of these big companies in the past.
Sony did a lot of "lock in" with needlessly requiring Sony-branded accessories for its products, so I'm not so sorry to see THAT part vanish. (Sony memory sticks, for example? Ick.) But all in all, I think we're going to lose some quality products with this.
They never understood that every part of the product has to be well executed in order to charge a premium.
True. Especially true for their software. I have a Sony A9 camera. It's a fantastic piece of hardware with amazing capabilities. But the one glaring flaw it has is that the software interface and network connectivity is just atrocious. (to be fair I could say the same about Canon or Nikon) Sony built an amazing device but didn't get the user interface bit because they are just clueless when it comes to that. That's been my experience with a lot of Sony kit. Good hardware, interesting design, well made, but shits the bed in software. If they got that bit right they could absolutely mop up in certain product lines.
They invested a ton in R&D, and not nearly enough in manufacturing. That resulted in capturing only early adopters, and not the mass market.
That's not necessarily a problem if you outsource manufacturing. Apple invests rather little in manufacturing and instead outsourced most of it. Apple played to their strengths (software and design and brand) whereas Sony did not. When it comes to manufacturing you either have to be all in or get out. Samsung is all in. Apple is all out. Both are fine but you can't do it halfway like Sony has for so many years. You'll get eaten alive by lower cost producers.
You do realize that a camera and a sensor are not the same?
Thanks Captain Pedantic! You saved the day again.
And like the early iPhone, you only had a walkman if you had money.
I grew up with the walkman and remember when it first came out. The initial version cost something like $150 which is around $500 adjusted for inflation in todays money I think. It didn't take long for them to fall enough in price that they were almost everywhere. Most of my classmates in school had one at some point including me and my parents were far from rich.
I don't know if Sony was able to do that. I don't think I every had enough money to buy a real walkman.
For a long time Sony made a killing with the walkman. Go check out their old financial statements. It's pretty interesting. Your analogy to Apple isn't a terrible one in some ways. It was definitely the hot portable electronic gadget of the 80s. Probably more similar to Apple with the iPod than the iPhone though. The iPhone is FAR more useful than the Walkman could ever have hoped to be.
I hung in there with HiMD but after a while Sonic Stage just became stale; the future was clearly MP3 on flash memory. I do miss the long playing times, simple interface, and good sound quality. Even my MZ-1 was able to drive full size cans to nearly hearing-damage levels.
Absolutely. The NW-E507 (and siblings) was probably the greatest music player ever built. Tiny, sleek, beautiful, intuitive to operate, and with a spectacular battery life, (40+ hrs/chg!!!) loved that thing! Only problems were Sonic Stage was an utter pile of dogshit software, (the software thing...) and lack of expandability because Apple and Sony read from the same playbook on that issue.
I would have TOTALLY bought another if they kept making them, ESPECIALLY if they kept the design the same, and upped the memory capacity... imagine a music player that sleek, tiny, and beautiful, if you could side-load podcasts, music, etc., via MTP or MSC without using the giant pain-in-the-ass, flaming dumpster-fire that was Sonic Stage, and stored more than a gigabyte of music on it... like maybe 16, or 32...
I can’t say I’m saddened or even surprised Sony’s doing this... they’ve always been known for amazing, innovative hardware crippled by laughably shitty software, like the PlayStation. Trouble is, this is an idiotic move, and will end Sony. They’re incorrectly assuming a software only business model is sustainable, because they’re so focused on the near future that they are ignoring the future that’s slightly farther away.
Their leadership seems to have been seduced by the Dark Side of the Force, and boy oh boy is it going to bite them in a whole new asshole that they’re about to get torn. In 5 to 7 years, when Sony is filing for bankruptcy, and their senior executives are committing the rite of Seppuku with a dull, rusty tanto, I will remind people I predicted this, and point out that they could have resurrected the MP3 player market with a rerelease of decent hardware, esp. as the smartphone fad ends, people realize what a spectacularly stupid idea trading privacy for convenience on industrial scales, and how nice it would be if anyone still made a decent goddamned Walkman, that didn’t also function as a 1984-style telescreen, allowing government and the companies that own it to track you everywhere and listen in on everything you say, see everything you do, and narc you the fuck out before you even think about doing something that could harm them and their precious goddamned fucking corporate bottom line.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
innovative hardware crippled by laughably shitty software
It wasn't just the software, it was just about everything that was "soft". The hardware was almost always great, but then it was crippled by some ridiculous idea that involved DRM, ongoing fees, and other proprietary schnanagins that weren't "better". Sony could have been Apple during the iPod days, leading up to the iPhone, but it couldn't get its collective head out of its ass long enough to stop crippling their products with bullshit.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
What company should we go do, who offer cheap superior products?
During the 1980's and 1990's Sony was much like how Apple is Now. (Where I am willing to bet a lot of people will say "Apple hardware has always been subpar and overly expensive" as well)
However what looks like what go them, is the move from CRT to LCD TVs where their Trinitron technology just stopped being used. Being late to the MP3 player market. Does Sony even make Smart Phones? Because they had taken over a mountain of Sony gear in one little device.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I disagree with with the AC grandparent who said that Sony hardware was overpriced and subpar - I felt like you always got what you paid for. Sure, they made some crap - but they also made stuff that was a good value. Their mid-range home theater stuff was always pretty nice.
I think part of their strategy, at least with home theater gear, was to make certain items quality and others with planned obsolescence, and hope you buy the crap gear to keep your system "all Sony" - and it worked on me. I bought a Sony receiver/amp in the mid-90s which still works fine to this day, but I had two 90's-era Sony CD changers crap out after 2-3 years each, one VCR and one cassette deck die after a few more years. I swore off buying any of their components again after that. Between that and the other stuff they've pulled which didn't affect me personally (the CD rootkit thing, the retraction of the alternate OS on PS2s), I feel glad that they're getting out of hardware. They've in general treated their customers like shit.
They did that reneging on Other OS on the PS2 TOO?!? Or did you mean PS3? That’s the one that came with an internal HDD, the ability to play Blu-ray movies out of the box, etc... my other issue with the PS3 is locking stuff off like hardware acceleration of video, and reducing the size of the screen, if you booted to “other OS,” BEFORE they ripped the functionality out... that was when I swore I’d never buy another Sony product that used software. Between the underground mine fire that was Sonic Stage, and the Other OS debacle, the only thing since then that I’ve bought because of the word “Sony” on the packaging were headphones, and they’re basically washed up there too. I bought several pairs when I realized they (wired Apple-compatible headphones with full, three-button remote controls,) we’re going extinct, and hope those will last me for most of the rest of my life. Because fuck ALL that Bluetooth bullshit.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
Like the iPhone only the Cool kids had them. The rest of our poor slobs had to deal with the cheaper inferior competing company model. Like Samsung, or Panasonic
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Is it taught in MBA classes now that the only way to make money is to sell subscriptions and non-tangible goods? That makes sense in web startup land...(how many copycat subscription box services are there? There's at least 2 in each category.) But yeah, it's like the entire manufacturing industry has decided that just because something isn't as insanely high-margin as software, that it should be abandoned.
Are there any companies not thinking this way? Even GM and Ford probably want to sell you autonomous car subscriptions instead of getting the measly $1000 or so profit on each car sold.
You're right - I meant PS3. They did make some good professional headphones. I have a pair of MDR-7506 studio monitor headphones which a lot of DJs use, and mine have held up to this day aside from replacing the earpads. I wouldn't be surprised though if the quality of the ones sold today isn't up to par with the ones sold 20 years ago.
www.gaiageek.com
Why do you call MiniDisc a "boondoggle"? It was decent idea to try at the time, in my opinion. You gotta try new things in the market to stay competitive. Some will secede and some will fail, and hopefully average out for the better.
True, they could have managed it better, such as trying to increase market share over profits by having more lower-end player options. Recording labels would then offer more choice in the format. Limited content choice was a problem. Perhaps they would have eventually got a clue, but iPod and MP3 players then came along and cleaned their clock. Again, sometimes you lose such that you have to keep a lot of irons in the fire.
Their general problem is that China squeezed their profits on the hardware side, and they were slow to catch up on the software/UI side when products grew more digital. The profit margins shifted toward software and away from hardware. Being a hardware company, it is hard to switch overnight. Are you going to turn thousands of hardware engineers into software engineers? Fire them and start over? That would be a morale kicker, and hardware quality would suffer even more. Change put them into a tough spot.
Similarly, the gasoline engine car giants will probably have some ugly battles with electric-oriented co's, and a giant or two may fall.
Table-ized A.I.
Sony has been on my boycott list since 2005 due to their attempted (attempted is the keyword here, +1 Linux) cracking of my personal hardware. Hope their "illegal" (we know it isn't really illegal if a corporation does it) practices were worth it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal
Also, Sandisk is on my shit-list too for refusing to honor a mail-in rebate for $5. I hope they enjoyed missing out of $1000s (literally, thousands (I like storage)) of dollars in sales to save 5 bucks.
The issue with this assertion is that the Vaio line wasn't actually premium hardware.
I'll kinda beg to differ. Sony tried, arguably harder than anyone, to make the Media Center PC happen. HP made a handful at the time, but virtually every Vaio had a TV tuner and/or capture card in it. Their all-in-one PCs could easily be used (or mistaken for) TVs if mounted on the wall, and commonly had a remote and an HDMI in so you could plug a cable box into it. I remember a friend of mine had one of their laptops with a really nifty multipurpose slot that could fit either a subwoofer, a floppy drive, or a number pad into it, which was a really cool idea at the time - a time when a P4 with 512MB of RAM and a 120GB hard disk were pretty high end specs, which is what this machine had.
Vaio computers, however, had two very related problems. First, they had more bundled software than anyone else. Now, some of it was interesting like intro editions of Acid and Sound Forge, as well as Movieshaker and a stripped down version of Adobe Premiere and a number of other media production applications that actually were some of the better bundled titles being used at the time. They came, however, with MagicGate and a dozen other useless applications, which all had a startup stub or two. Sure, you'd have about the highest quantity of RAM that was shipping with a computer at the time, but 2/3 of it would be used up by the time the computer finished starting...and the number of startup wizards you'd have to answer or cancel could easily take half an hour. This wouldn't be nearly as bad if it weren't for their second problem: they put some of the slowest hard drives imaginable into them. 5400RPM drives were the norm, and even today only a handful ship with SSDs. Computer startups could easily take six minutes, and you'll never see one with a spun down hard disk. I would sit at one and ask myself if anyone at Sony ever had to actually use one on a day-to-day basis, because it sure didn't seem like it.
It was particularly sad because all of these issues were readily solvable.
Nonsense. Before they got a management transplant from Hollywood Sony had superb hardware. It was expensive, but it was superb. After they bought (and got taken over by) the media company, however, they quickly changed into a company that I will have nothing to do with even if they were to offer their stuff for free. (And the mood change to hypothetical subjunctive was intentional.)
I have know direct knowledge of anything Sony since they abused the Playstation customers by disabling Linux...and several news reports have made me glad of that.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The bigger picture is that many Chinese workers are de-facto slaves. They don't have much freedom of political speech and so can't do much about long hard hours. The Chinese gov't will argue (externally) that overall conditions for everybody has improved to deflect such criticism. But other countries grew economically without taking away freedom of political speech.
We should tariff countries that don't have workers' rights comparable to our own. However, other countries may use the same justification to tariff us, being many have better worker protection laws than USA. Whether that's a "bad thing" is long debate.
Table-ized A.I.
A 90's CD changer that's still in alignment? I call bullshit, unless your Dad has figured out how to realign it himself.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
IIRC it was shadow mask technology that, more or less, made Trinitron obsolete. After that the brightness differences were negligible.
Which was the last 20 years of tube.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Sony always made crap as well as quality. But even the crap was built to last, with exceptions of course.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I vaguely remember it as the last 10 or so years or so. All the TV companies started making nice flat tubes around the mid-late 90s.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Sony used to OWN the high end of the video camera market.
Some would say they still own the 'professional' video camera market. But that's nonsense, they have a good sized niche.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
yes Sony make smart phones and have met with little success. Basically depending on the product range there are different companies that make it better and quite often cheaper. With the internet it is easy nowadays to do your research before a purchase, Sony really are only the electronics choice for those stuck in the past or fans of PlayStation.
Trintrons main advantage was brightness. As the other early masking technologies blocked a significant part of the screen area.
Flat glass was a separate development process.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
the problem was the only thing premium about the Vaio line was the price.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Their second tier sensor...to get Sony's best sensor in a cell phone you have to buy a Sony phone.
Unless you can provide evidence I'm calling bullshit. Apple is Sony's largest customer for camera sensors by a fair margin. I'm pretty sure they are getting whatever sensor Apple wants.
Sony is up to their old tricks.
And which tricks do you figure those are?
That doesn't mean they're making any money from it.
Sony has made plenty of profit from the Playstation. You should check your facts more carefully. In 2016 the Playstation division accounted for 3/4 of Sony's profits for the whole corporation.
The PlayStation hardware was sold at a significant loss
The Playstation has been a significant cash cow for Sony for quite a few years now. Microsoft tried to buy into the market with Xbox but Sony has been making money on Playstation for a long time.
There is also more to it than just the sensor, hence why Nikon can obtain higher image quality than Sony at times.
Nikon uses a lot of Sony sensors though they seem to be trying to get away from that. You are right that other things matter to the final image (including lenses especially). But outside of some specialty lenses, Sony has cameras and lenses that equal or sometimes surpass the offerings that Nikon has these days. Sony's A9 and A7-3 and A7-R3 cameras are remarkable pieces of kit that are kind of game changers along with their G-Master glass. I'm not saying Sony cameras get better results than Nikon - I'm just saying they are roughly at parity for most use cases. You could buy either one and get really good results.
I think Nikon as a company is kind of in trouble actually. They have fallen behind Sony on sensor tech and mirrorless cameras (which are replacing SLRs) as well as some other important technology in areas like autofocus. Nikon is also reluctant to cannibalize their DSLR sales and has less budget to throw into R&D than Sony (or Canon for that matter). They're kind of living on their existing user base and most of the really interesting new tech is coming from Sony. I don't have anything against Nikon and I quite like some of their gear but I'm worried that they may not be able to keep pace with Sony if they don't get a really compelling mirrorless camera out there that is competitive with the A7-III.
Keeping their best sensors and lowest defect sensors for their own cameras.
Even if that were true (and you haven't established that it is) so what? I don't see why that is a problem.
Sony's best phone, with a _much_ better sensor then is in the iPhones..
Several problems with that argument. 1) You have no idea if Apple actually wanted that sensor given their other design parameters. 2) It's not clear if the sensor was available early enough in Apple's design process. 3) You have no idea if Sony was ready to produce the sensor in the volumes Apple would need (WAY more than Sony sells under their own brand). Ramping production up to Apple volumes is not a trivial endeavor and there are lead times involved. 4) Apple is their largest customer for their camera sensors - it is unlikely Sony is going to piss off Apple especially with Samsung making noises about becoming a big player in the camera sensor market. I suspect if Apple wants that sensor or any other sensor Sony makes they'll get it. 5) It's not a dual camera sensor so there are design tradeoffs to consider. It's also not immediately clear for which use cases the MotionEye sensor might be superior.
If you go far enough back that wasn't true. Sony was a technology leader for many years, starting with their pioneering transistor radio. Notable Sony products include the Trinitron TV, Betamax (which ended up losing in the marketplace but it was on the market before VHS), the semi-professional U-Matic video recorder, CD and DVD players, 8mm camcorders, and the Walkman and Discman portable music players. Once other companies came in Sony didn't usually offer the lowest prices; they instead competed on quality and design.
Sony also made a lot of audio products: receivers and the like. Their offerings were solid but not exceptional; their value was usually about equal to other major Japanese brands like Pioneer. They made speakers that were successful in Japan but not in the US; US listeners seem to prefer a slightly different sound.
They haven't been as much of a technology leader in the 21st century. They have produced the PlayStation series and are a key member of the Blu-Ray and Ultra Blu-Ray consortia. They are also a leader in imaging technologies, both as a maker of image sensors that are widely used and with their own camera business (acquired from Minolta). Sony is still a solid player in video cameras but pretty much on a par with others now.
When flat panel TVs took over Sony decided to position itself at the premium end of the market, which turned out to be a precarious spot because other companies quickly matched their quality at lower prices. Then they gave up on flat panel production and switched to making TVs based on other people's panels, which was an even more difficult position to be in if you wanted to sell a premium product. At this point leadership in the TV market has largely shifted to Samsung and LG, which not coincidentally are also the major manufacturer of high quality flat panels. Sony tried a similar course in phones, trying to lean on their design expertise and their brand to sell a high priced product, with little success.
To be fair to Sony, the DVD format includes a do-not-skip flag, and officially licensed products are required to honor it. Sony is a key member of the DVD consortium so they're not about to produce players that violate the license.
The cheap Chinese players, as well as software players other than the brand name ones like PowerDVD, ignore the flag, but they are also not officially licensed products. VLC, for example, perhaps the most popular DVD software on computers, uses the pirated libdvdcss to decode the decryption on discs rather than using a licensed solution.
Professional cameras are an exception. Sony makes some excellent professional camcorders for news gathering and low-end video production. Arri and RED own the high end of digital filmmakng, most digital Hollywood productions use one of those brands. Sony is popular for documentaries, made-for-TV productions, and corporate videos.
They also make fine still cameras with an emphasis on video features, both for professionals and the prosumer market - not surprising given the company's strength in video. One of those, the A7S (and its successor the A7S II) is groundbreaking in its ability to capture high quality video in very low light - it is usable at ISO 100,000, which is insane in a world where most cameras shoot video at iSO 800 and top out around ISO 3,200. That's a difference of FIVE F-stops - that camera can shoot quality video in situations where you can barely SEE.
They have competition from both the traditional camera companies (Nikon and Canon) and from other electronics companies (Panasonic and Samsung). But Sony is holding its own so far. Some users are still sour on Sony because of their earlier use of the non-standard Memory Stick, but they gave that up years ago and the pro cameras never did use it.
There's a very obvious difference between the Playstation hardware (you know, the stuff everyone else here is talking about) and the Playstation business unit (which only you are talking about).
A distinction without a difference. There is no Playstation without both the hardware and software. It's an integrated product. You can't meaningfully talk about one without the other. The fact that they don't try to make a profit on the base console is IRRELEVANT because that isn't their business model. To argue that Sony makes no money on the Playstation hardware requires you to narrow the scope of your accounting analysis so narrow as to render it meaningless. (I should know because I'm a certified accountant)
It is a verifiable fact that at launch, Sony lost money on every Playstation 4 sold,
Sigh... When was the last time anyone bought a Playstation console and nothing else? Oh that's right... never. It's a razors and blades model. They make a ton of money on the hardware - just not up front. The hardware is useless by itself. Talking about the component cost of the Playstation hardware is near as makes no difference a meaningless discussion unless it is part of a broader conversation about the entire business model for the product.
The latest generations of Xbox have also allowed the Xbox division to become a profitable unit within Microsoft as well, despite them also selling their console hardware
Microsoft spent years losing billions of dollars trying to buy their way to success. I can't be bothered to check to see if they've finally recouped their investment. Presumably they have by now but they were deep in the red for a very long time. Only their deep pockets allowed them to stay the course.
However what looks like what go them, is the move from CRT to LCD TVs where their Trinitron technology just stopped being used.
Nope. That happened long ago. Mitsubishi had Diamondtron for example, whose wires were less noticeable than Trinitron. Sony actually had superior LCD TVs for years, to pretty much everyone but SHARP. Now neither one is better than LG. Since everyone can make a decent LCD panel now, Sony isn't special any more.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"