78 replies to this topic

[tssk]

Ouch.

http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/326222/20120410/sony-losses-2011-loss-record-billion-hirai.htm

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. 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.

I wonder if the games market can save Sony this time.

[Harsin]

Sony thinking they can sell stuff like this for £250 sums up a lot of the problems with the current organisation.

[scottcr]

and people still expect the PS4 to be based on face melting technology

[NEG]

Sony thinking they can sell stuff like this for £250 sums up a lot of the problems with the current organisation.

...That is quite simply the best thing ever.

[Dandy_Sephy]

and people still expect the PS4 to be based on face melting technology

I don't know the current financials for the games division, but they only have two competitors in that market. In the TV, smartphone, tablet, laptop, home and portable audio markets they have too much competition, many of whom are in much better shape and delivering better products for similar/less money. In the Camera market they have a decent presence and although I don't know anything about their current lineup, their SLR products were giving superb value for money. Again they are up against competitors, Canon and Nikon are pretty much the defacto first choices for most people.

Ps4 will feature whatever hardware Sony think they can afford to put in it, as it has always done. Console R+D and life cycle is unique, so they won't make too many changes there.. Using off the shelf technology will certainly improve costings compared to ps3.

[Vermin]

Sony thinking they can sell stuff like this for £250 sums up a lot of the problems with the current organisation.

They should've used the Vita marketing spend on those bad boys. I know what I'd rather have.

[scottcr]

Sony thinking they can sell stuff like this for £250 sums up a lot of the problems with the current organisation.

I want one.

[PK.]

***There have been some comments regarding the color of the Rollys and why the white one is in front. This is in no way due to any form of racism. I placed the white in front because it simply looked better than an asymmetrical order.***

Amazing

[Harsin]

Thing is, there's absolutely zero reason that Sony shouldn't be where Apple are right now.

Take the portable music market, it's a case study in mistakes Sony keeps on making across its various lines. Sony pretty much was the portable music market, to the extent that everybody just referred to any portable cassette player as a Walkman (as many do with MP3 players and iPods now).

When the digital revolution hit the music market Sony was slow to respond and made numerous decisions that bit it on the arse from incompetence or arrogance, I'm not sure which. Not least, once again, insisting on a proprietary format. While everybody was talking about MP3s, Sony players required you to convert your music to their proprietary ATRAC format. Oh and to do this you had to use SonicStage, about as godawful a piece of software that was ever programmed (another problem Sony has to this day is decent hardware, poor software). Unsurprisingly, while the public were buying iPods in droves Sony digital Walkmans were collecting dust on the shelf. Eventually they reversed these decisions, but by then it was far too late. I actually owned one of the later models and it was an excellent little device.

[womblingfree]

Sony thinking they can sell stuff like this for £250 sums up a lot of the problems with the current organisation.

As much as that is fucking brillaint, I'd rather see them resurrect Aibo and a Qrio. If you're going to lose billions of dollars, at least do it progressing robot-kind.

Anyway, isn't it TV's that are losing a sizeable chunk?

[Soulstar]

***There have been some comments regarding the color of the Rollys and why the white one is in front. This is in no way due to any form of racism. I placed the white in front because it simply looked better than an asymmetrical order.***

Ironically the first time I saw this video one of the things that popped into my mind was the wonder of whether anyone would be insanely picky at exactly that fact mentioned above. That pisses me off almost as much as racism itself does.

[Mentazm]

Bring back the walkman and sell to hipsters. Also start makign those 'radio headphones' complete with aerials again. INSTAMEGABUX!

[womblingfree]

When the digital revolution hit the music market Sony was slow to respond and made numerous decisions that bit it on the arse from incompetence or arrogance, I'm not sure which. Not least, once again, insisting on a proprietary format. While everybody was talking about MP3s, Sony players required you to convert your music to their proprietary ATRAC format. Oh and to do this you had to use SonicStage, about as godawful a piece of software that was ever programmed (another problem Sony has to this day is decent hardware, poor software). Unsurprisingly, while the public were buying iPods in droves Sony digital Walkmans were collecting dust on the shelf. Eventually they reversed these decisions, but by then it was far too late. I actually owned one of the later models and it was an excellent little device.

They didn't just miss the boat, they had the boat and torpedoed it themselves whilst shooting themselves in the head.

They didn't just have the means of taking the globally dominant Walkman brand and transforming it into an unassailable MP3 player years before anyone else, they also missed out on having a major presence in the downloadable conten.t market. PS3 should have come with in-built Sony Netflix thing on day one.

Still, all ancient history. Surely to stop hemorrhaging money they need to sell off entire divisions and stop producing millions of products like TV's and focus again on innovation, rather than losing out to Samsung and LG with mass-produced stuff.

[Harsin]

I'll try and find the a link to the article on Stringer's reign that was in Forbes or Businessweek or another similar magazine. One of the problems it mentions is that Sony produce a mind-boggling number of different TV models with only impenetrable model names to immediately differentiate them*. Why? Surely they only need three basic models (low-end, medium and high-end) available in a range of screen sizes. I hate to keep using Apple as a comparison, but one of the reasons they remain so successful is a lack of consumer confusing frangmentation across their ranges.

* I know Samsung, Panasonic, LG...etc operate a similar model, doesn't make it right.

[Daley]

Apple is a good comparison. Sony are in the games/music/film business and consumer electronics business. They should have had this shit wrapped up. Instead Apple ate them for breakfast. All starting with the humble iPod. That Steve Jobs book was brilliant on this subject. Sony were so resistant to Apple's involvement they were the last major to sign up for iTunes (I think, couple months since I finished the book). They made the Walkman, cameras, phones and games consoles and produced all the content. It's a classic case of a company being too big to get the best out of all the seperate divisions and bring it all together.

The TV thing is a good point too. You just know when Apple finally make a TV they will probably produce one model in two different sizes or something crazy like that.

[Vermin]

I hope that six billion was put into genetic experiments to create a dog-bird to promote The Last Guardian.

[Harsin]

They made the Walkman, cameras, phones and games consoles and produced all the content. It's a classic case of a company being too big to get the best out of all the seperate divisions and bring it all together.

That's a very good points, by all accounts Sony's various divisions have been run like little personal fiefdoms and Howard Stringer would come in and outline his plans, they'd nod and smile at him, then promptly ignore what he said and go back to what they were doing and in some cases hostilely competing with each other. If you buy 5 different Sony devices then you're likely to encounter 5 radically different OS GUIs.

Found that article I mentioned.

http://www.businessw...w-11172011.html

But still with corporate synergy like this they can't fail.



This is up there with the N-Gage skateboarder advert in terms of the bizarre vision of what a 50 year old ad executive believes will appeal to the 'yoof'.

[JohnC]

Random guitar bloke is great

[Wickedkitten]

They just got rid of Qore in the US but that is meant to be more down to Future publishing than anything

[Comrade]

It's worth pointing out that the Vita sold less than 10,000 in Japan again this week.

[Masu]

Sony buggered themselves with their arrogance, blinkered stupidity (as Harsin said, they WERE portable, personal music, @PS2 they WERE the games industry.. almost.) and their contempt to their own customer base.

Hacking denials, then cover ups, then finally admissions. Finger-in-the-ears hardware developing and selfish fuck-you-all greed in their movie and music arms did no good whatsoever. As did their hugely overpriced TVs and laptops.

And their inability to develop a controller. Lets not forget that

[RubberJohnny]

With products like the Sony Tablet P how could this have happened?

[Harsin]

It's worth pointing out that the Vita sold less than 10,000 in Japan again this week.

The Vita is a good current example of a decent piece of base hardware being undone by a lot of the issues already cited. Once again we have a proprietary format rearing its head. Consumers now generally expect a device of this nature to have onboard storage built into the device or to have it upgradeable with generic memory cards. What certainly doesn't fly is trying to flog proprietary memory cards with worse speeds than your average Sandisk (according to a comparison I read) for £40 a pop for 16GB (the minimum that I'd argue customers expect on a device of this nature nowadays).

The other disastrous mistake they made was releasing it in Japan first (three months ahead of the rest of the world). Can anyone give me a reason beyond 'that's what they've always done' as a reason for this decision, because I can't think of one and on the surface it appears to be a classic case of big corporation inertia. Not only is the Japanese gaming market a shadow of it's former self (I believe the UK alone outranks it now), they launched there without any games that really appealed to Japanese sensibilities, whereas stuff like Uncharted and Wipeout were more likely to appeal to the Western market. By doing this they missed the Christmas market in the West (Nintendo had a very, very good Christmas unopposed with the 3DS) and eventually released it worldwide into an environment where all the air in the room tech-wise was being sucked out by the impending launch of the iPad 3 in less than a month.

[Keyboard Koala]

Someone with better shoop skills than I should add the "running girl" in that too!

[Cheeko]

Used to buy their TVs because Trinitron were amazing sets, used to buy their consoles because PS2 dominated the console sector. Then I find myself having to buy their micro memory cards because they are a proprietary format for the PSP and having to buy blu-ray because they bribed the industry to destroy HD-DVD, that's about the extent of my involvement with them these days.

[Keyboard Koala]

Used to buy their TVs because Trinitron were amazing sets, used to buy their consoles because PS2 dominated the console sector. Then I find myself having to buy their micro memory cards because they are a proprietary format for the PSP and having to buy blu-ray because they bribed the industry to destroy HD-DVD, that's about the extent of my involvement with them these days.

Same here. Trinitrons were amazing.
And yet I never bought anything but SanDisk cards for my PSP, and I can't say I have jumped on the Blu-ray bandwagon either.

[Dandy_Sephy]

Supposedly SanDisk actually made the cards for Sony. Yet were faster and cheaper!

[Napole0n]

There's really no point in buying a Sony television or stereo these days. They're expensive and not better than the competition in the same price bracket anymore. In fact, usually you can get better stuff for less.

So yeah, I used to be a Sony whore but these days it's mainly Samsung and LG screens and Onkyo audio and the like. The only Sony peripherals I buy these days are their consoles.

I do hope they survive though, Sony at their best can achieve amazing stuff. The PS2, PS3 and PSVita are good examples of that, but also former glories like the Walkman, Minidisc and Trinitron screens.

[Mentazm]

I loved my net enabled minidisk, just before ipods took off. And my 32" Trinitron, which served me well for about 10 years, all during the PS2 n N64 glory days.

[macosx]

Sony were technology, strange how they completely lost the plot. I think the last Sony product I bought was my PS3 fat and I wouldnt even have Sony on my radar when picking up a TV.