Sony StumbleS: DiD Stringer`S makeover fail?

special report
REUTERS/Toshiyuki Aizawa
Sony stumbles: Did
Stringer's makeover fail?
Slow response to a huge hacking attack exposed frailties and raise questions
about whether its culture remains too bureaucratic and complacent
By Tim Kelly and Kenneth Li
TOKYO/NEW YORK, May 23
H
ad Sony stuck with the Airboard
portable computer it launched in
2000, Satoru Maeda rather than Apple's
Steve Jobs might have been feted as the
creator of tablet PCs.
"I was the inventor of the Airboard," says
Maeda between mouthfuls of fried prawn
may 2011
and dumplings at a Chinese restaurant in
downtown Tokyo.
He was referring to a flat panel device that
predated the iPad by a decade yet boasted
video, touch screen typing and Internet
access.
A hefty price tag and patchy picture
quality were among the reasons the product,
which in hindsight looks like it was ahead
of its time, didn't initially take off. Internal
politics and a series of disruptive divisional
reorganizations ensured the product never
got the management focus it needed to
succeed, Maeda says.
Morphing it into Location Free TV -- a
device through which you can watch local
TV channels anywhere -- wasn't enough
to convince Sony or the marketplace that
it was going to work. The project that was
once touted as being as revolutionary as the
sony
may 2011
Sony's Walkman audio player is seen at its showroom in Tokyo May 4, 2011. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon
Walkman was dropped entirely in 2008.
Maeda said he knew a year earlier that
Sony under Howard Stringer, who became
CEO in 2005, was going to kill his invention.
His boss sent him an e-mail saying he was
taking it over.
Soon after, he quit the company he
had joined in 1979 when Sony launched
the Walkman and was one of the coolest
companies around. It was a heyday Stringer
pledged to restore, but Maeda, who is now at
audio visual equipment maker JVC Kenwood,
no longer sees returning.
"Sony old boys liked Airboard and Location
Free TV because it was doing something new,
which is what they did at Sony," said Maeda.
"The current Sony people have no experience
with such things because they haven't
introduced any new products for about 10
years."
Still beset by turf wars, secrecy,
complacency and a bloated innovationkilling corporate bureaucracy, Maeda and
other Sony refugees insist their former
employer is in dire straits and Stringer, who
is 69, is running out of time to deliver on his
promise of reinventing the company.
Certainly Stringer can boast of his role in
developing 3-D film-making and the victory
of the Sony-backed Blu-ray technology in
the next generation format wars. But Sony,
despite its iconic brand, remains out of step
with the rest of the global technology world
and its talent for crowd-pleasing innovation
has largely evaporated.
A hacking scandal that in April exposed
more than 100 million accounts of users of
its online gaming network to possible data
theft not only hurt its image but threatens
an online strategy meant to unite a disparate
corporation and could upset a carefully
crafted succession plan for when Stringer
steps down.
It wasn't so much the security breach itself
but the delays in informing customers of the
Diverging fortunes: Sony vs Apple
Share price performance - $
Sony
Apple
400
MARKET CAP
Sony: $27 bln / Apple: $310 bln
300
200
100
0
1995 1997 19992001 2003 20052007 20092011
1994: Sony launches the PlayStation
1995: Sony debuts its first consumer-use digital
video camcorder.
1997: Sony unveils the home-use PC "VAIO"
1999: Nobuyuki ldei succeeds Norio Ohga as CEO
1997: Jobs returns afrer being ousted in 1985. He became
Apple's permanent CEO in 2000.
2001: Apple opens its first retail store and debuts the iPod
digital music player.
2003: Apple launches the iTunes music store.
2000: Sony launches PlayStation 2.
2007: Apple debuts the iPhone and opens the App store in
the following year.
2009: Jobs takes a six-month leave of absence and
undergoes a liver transplant. He was diagnosed with
pancreeatic cancer in 2004.
2010: Apple unveils the iPad, its touch-screen tablet.
2011: Jobs takes second leave of absence but appeared at
the March launch of the iPad 2.
2003: Sony introduces the Blu-ray disc.
2005: Howard Stringer replaced ldei as CEO
2006: Sony releases PlayStation 3.
2011: Sony unveils the Android tablet PC; the PlayStation
Network was compromised in April - 77 mln user accounts
were hacked.
Sources: Companies, Thomson Reuters.
Reuters graphic/Christine Chan
problem and Sony's subsequent inability to
quickly close other weak spots vulnerable to
hackers that has left a stain.
"Too big to succeed comes to mind," a
former senior manager involved until recently
with Sony's PlayStation game console told
Reuters, declining to be identified because
of the sensitivity of the comments. "I was at
PlayStation, considered the most flexible
of the Sony units, but ironically that was
crippled by over-secretive IT security, a lack
of a coherent management structure and
a lot of dead wood at the top. It was harder
to work across Sony units than to work with
outside partners," he said.
It isn't only former insiders who see the
05/20/11
magnitude of the problems.
A procession of top executives at U.S.
technology companies who spoke at Reuters
Global Technology Summit last week didn't
mince their words when asked about Sony.
Robert Glaser, chairman of Internet media
software company RealNetworks Inc, likened
Stringer's task of rehabilitating Sony to
"introducing capitalism to a Soviet-bloc
country after 50 years of communism."
CAUTIONARY TALE
The erosion of Sony's standing is
a cautionary tale of what can happen to
technology companies when innovators move
on. Back when Sony, led by co-founder Akio
2
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Morita, launched the Walkman, it proved an
inspiration to the founders of the then littleknown startup company: Apple Computers.
"Sony had the most incredibly well-thought
out products in the world. We wanted to be
like that from day one," Steve Wozniak, Apple
co-founder, told Reuters recently. At the
time, "no other company in the world was the
model for consumer electronics."
As Japan's seemingly unstoppable economy
expanded through the 1980s, Sony remained
the consumer electronics benchmark as
Morita handed over the creative mantle to
maverick Norio Ohga, a trained opera singer
who caught the founder's attention by writing
to complain about the quality of Sony's audio
tapes.
Ohga, who died in April aged 81, is best
remembered for convincing the world to give
up vinyl in favor of CDs and for green-lighting
one young executive's ploy to beat Nintendo
at its own game with the PlayStation.
The serial successes, though, bred
complacency. "If you had the Sony name on
the back of your shirt you were fine, so they
stopped thinking," Maeda says.
In 1989, the Japanese economic juggernaut
stalled and the benchmark Nikkei index
topped out just shy of 39,000, marking the
start of an asset value slump that continues
to sap Japan's economic vitality 22 years later.
That same year, amid a frenetic Japanese
pursuit of landmark overseas assets, Sony
made its first big mistake.
The company bought Hollywood studio
Columbia Pictures for $3.9 billion from the
Coca Cola Company. It was a business and
culture that Sony didn't fully understand and
became a big distraction for management.
Five years later as Ohga handed Sony over
to Nobuyuki Idei it was forced to write off $2.7
billion from the purchase after a string of
costly box-office flops.
Seven years later, Apple's Steve Jobs,
inspired by Sony's Walkman, launched the
iPod digital player. It was a seminal event for
Apple and a huge warning for Sony.
In one move, Apple ended Sony's
dominance of the music player market and
left little doubt that Sony was heading for a
full-blown crisis.
Back in 2000, Sony's market value had
been more than seven times Apple's. Today,
Sony's market value is only one eleventh of
Apple's, and its share price is little changed
from 1995 -- the year it launched the digital
camcorder.
may 2011
Sony shows off the new CD Walkman at the 20th anniversary celebration marking the first Walkman headphone
stereo in Tokyo on July 1, 1999. REUTERS/Toshiyuki Aizawa
"If you had the Sony name on
the back of your shirt you were fine,
so they stopped thinking."
TOO ORDINARY
When Stringer was appointed Sony's
Chairman and CEO in 2005 he was keen to
show that he could revitalize the company's
reputation for creativity. As a Welshman
running a Japanese company, but who
understood its corporate culture, he was
seen as having a better chance of shaking it
up than most.
After a bruising first year of heavy losses,
he was anxious to kick off the annual
management meeting at Tokyo's Grand
Prince Hotel New Takanawa on an optimistic
note. Stringer trotted out a group of what he
claimed were the 50 brightest engineers that
Sony had to show the 1,200-strong crowd of
managers gathered in the ballroom.
"These are our future," Stringer boasted
of the group of the cleanest, most wellcomposed assemblage of geeks, recalls one
former Sony executive in attendance that
morning.
They "were the equivalent of scrubbed,
West Point recruits," he said in reference to
a prestigious U.S. military academy. "No
tattoos, no piercings, no 14-year-olds," the
former Sony manager said. "I remember
saying, 'We're so screwed.' No one in that
group was going to say 'Why the fuck do we
need a (computer) mouse.'"
Sony's problem, offers Hironobu Yokota, a
procurement manager who left Sony in 1995
because "all the misfits had left" is that it
has become ordinary, a condition he says is
worsening.
"I have consulted for Sony several times
since I left. Looking at it from the outside, it is
basically getting worse and worse," explains
Yokota.
Even the engineer Sony eventually picked
to do battle with Apple is now among the
Sony refugees, and has become one of its
fiercest critics to boot.
Koichiro Tsujino, who spearheaded the
development of Sony's Vaio laptop, left
the company in 2006 and later headed
up Google's Japanese unit before recently
establishing his own cloud computing
company. His last project at Sony had been
to develop a rival to the iPod.
Tsujino blames much of his former
employer's problems on failures of corporate
governance and petty jealousies that he
says crushed what had been a creative
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atmosphere much like that at Google now.
"The biggest difference between Google
and Sony is that Google doesn't waver," says
Tsujino.
"Japanese companies, including Sony,
tend to waver. Sony is typical of this. That was
how it was when I left. They start working on
an Internet project, but when it doesn't work
out they will drop it in a year," said Tsujino at
his office in Tokyo.
Sony, he insists, needs someone like Ohga
-- unafraid to be "absurd, irrational and
outrageous."
As more Sonyites from the golden era
depart, the only traces left behind of famed
innovator Morita is the air of elitism, says
Osamu Katayama, a business writer who
in 2010 published a book "The Stringer
Revolution: What has he changed at Sony".
Morita he explains tried to become a pillar
of the Japanese establishment, his ambition
to head the prestigious Keidanren business
lobby. As a result "Sony has a very strong
sense of being elite," says the author, who
also dismisses Sony under Stringer as an
"ordinary company."
"Somebody needs to change Sony. I
thought Stringer would change things a bit
more, but it seems there were limits to what
he could do," says Katayama.
Sony could still find inspiration from its
humble beginnings. "Nobody knows about
the days when Sony was just a neighborhood
workshop and nobody tries to retain that
spirit as they do at Honda," Katayama says,
noting that the Japanese car company, which
eschews memberships in the clubs of Japan's
corporate elite, has managed to retain the
entrepreneurial spirit and atmosphere of a
street corner workshop.
Honda still lets its engineers roam. It is
renowned for giving them creative free rein
to conduct fundamental research that may
never end up as a product -- engineers have
unraveled the genome of rice, experimented
on cockroaches to see how they avoid
collision and designed and built a small jet
aircraft.
Google is known for having established
similar creative time for its staff while Jobs
at Apple is known for keeping his core
development team to a size where he can
remember everyone's name.
HACKING EXPOSES WEAKNESSES
Stringer has sought to unleash
creative juices by creating partnerships
between disconnected business units, a
strategy that he can claim has at least
may 2011
Sony's logo on VAIO laptop cases are seen at an
electronics shop in Tokyo May 4, 2011. REUTERS/Kim
Kyung-Hoon
started to result in hybrid products such as
Xperia Play -- everyone outside Sony refers to
it as the PlayStation phone -- from handset
operation Sony Ericcson.
The massive Internet security breach the
company suffered in April is all the more
difficult for the company to come to terms
with because it risks hurting that strategy by
damaging an online service that connected
the dots.
"The
PlayStation
network
and
(entertainment platform) Qriocity were really
intended to be a bridging and ecosystem
approach, trying to tie together the TVs, the
PlayStation, PSP, really tying in all of those
devices together into a complete ecosystem,"
says Mark Harding, an analyst who follows
Sony for U.S.-based investment company the
Maxim Group.
"If people lose faith and trust in the security
of a commerce platform or an ecosystem
platform like that, it does do damage to the
strategy," he added.
In the biggest ever theft of data on record,
hackers stole details from more than 100
million accounts of Sony's PlayStation
Network and PC-based online gaming
service as well as its Qriocity music service.
It prompted outrage from users, 90 percent
of whom are based in the United States and
Europe, not just because the company closed
the network down but because it waited a
week to announce the breach.
Critics, including the hacker community
and Wall Street analysts, laid the blame
squarely on Sony, for going to war with
hackers and programmers who have dared
to crack the code in its systems.
In 2001, Sony threatened legal action
against one owner of the Aibo, Sony's
robot dog, after the owner posted software
showing other owners how to make the Aibo
dance. And earlier this year, it took George
Hotz to court after the famed hacker, known
for unlocking Apple's iPhone, cracked open
the PlayStation 3 to let owners run their own
software.
This contrasts with the behavior of many
other major technology companies, who at
least seek a partial accommodation with
elements in the hacking community, and
certainly don't go out of their way to make
enemies.
The Internet breach sparked thousands
of comments on the official PlayStation fan
page on Facebook and on its blog, some of
them from users who said they would switch
to rival games networks, such as Xbox Live, a
Microsoft Corp product.
Sony insists it wasn't too slow to admit the
breach, although Sony watchers speculate
that Sony may have been loath to admit it
had been hit by hackers and wanted to play
down the attack.
It took Stringer another two weeks before
breaking his silence on the issue and then he
unapologetically defended the delays, saying
they weren't bad by corporate standards.
Speaking at a press roundtable last
Tuesday, where he fed journalists breakfast
on the 30th floor of Sony's New York
headquarters to mark the sixth birthday of
the PlayStation 3 games console, Stringer
downplayed the breach, describing it as
"hackers stealing games that were already
free."
"You're telling me my week wasn't fast
enough? We had to know what had been
stolen rather than leaking information out
piece by piece and panicking customers," he
said.
4
sony
may 2011
Attendees Dominie Liang (L) and Ruslan Belkin utilize the common area at the Google I/O Developers Conference in the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California, May 11,
2011. REUTERS/Beck Diefenbach
"The biggest difference between Google and Sony is that
Google doesn't waver."
The defiance didn't go down so well with
some PlayStation customers. One blogger
on website techdirt.com concluded, "CEO
Howard Stringer apparently has come to the
conclusion that there's still plenty of room for
more foot in Sony's mouth."
To make matters worse, there were
disclosures about three further problems
with the security of Sony websites last week.
The company was forced to shut down a
site it set up to help users affected by April's
breach after it found what it called a "security
hole".
Then, Internet security firm F-Secure
disclosed that a hacked page on a Sony
website in Thailand directed users to a fake
site posing as an Italian credit card company.
And, separately, Sony's So-Net unit that
provides Internet service in Japan alerted
customers that an intruder had broken into
its system and stole virtual points worth
$1,225 from account holders.
It all adds to the loss of appeal compared
with Apple and other rivals.
Apple's suite of products -- from its iMac
PCs, its iPod digital music players and
content-providing iTunes stores, plus its
wildly successful iPhone and iPad tablet
computers -- have won legions of fans for
their integration and sleek designs.
This is much less the case for Sony's
Vaio computers, PlayStation games, Sony
Ericsson mobile phones, MP3 players, Bravia
Men walk past an advertisement for Apple's iPad2 in front of an electronic shop in Tokyo on May 5, 2011.
REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon
televisions and trove of music and movies.
"The standard has to be, 'Where is the
product I'm going to line up the night
before to buy?'" says Steve Jacobs, a former
vice president of broadband strategy and
alliances at Sony Electronics in the United
States, alluding to the throngs that wait
hours and days ahead of Apple gadget
launches.
The stumbling is happening in a world
where companies like Apple and Google are
moving at an astonishing speed. "Sony has
to change if it's to compete in that race,"
says Geoff Blaber, an analyst with UK-based
5
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may 2011
"creating an environment that stresses a spirit of freedom and
open-mindedness, where employees could fully exercise
their skills and abilities." ­— sony's Shiro Kambe
Sony Corp's Executive Deputy President Kazuo Hirai bows his head with his executives Shiro Kambe (L) and Shinji Hasejima as they apologise for a massive security breach of
its PlayStation Network at a news conference in Tokyo on May 1, 2011. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon
technology research firm CCS Insight. "Sony
is seeking to deliver content and services
across multiple devices and platforms, but
product groups and corporate structure is
very, very fragmented compared to Apple."
Sony declined to make Stringer or another
top executive available for interview for this
article.
In a statement its head of corporate
communications Shiro Kambe said the
company "will continue to aim to capitalize
on the unique strengths our rivals do not
have - such as the broad deployment of our
products globally and our diverse business
line."
He said that a realignment in March
and some other initiatives would "further
integrate the full range of Sony's assets" and
allow for the next phases of the company's
growth and development.
Kambe also said that Sony's founding
principles -- "creating an environment
that stresses a spirit of freedom and openmindedness, where employees could fully
exercise their skills and abilities" -- was
still true today. The company had unveiled
numerous exciting products in the past few
months, he added.
GUSHING PRAISE
Most at risk of taking the blame for
Sony's latest debacle is Stringer's righthand man, Kazuo Hirai, who was anointed by
Stringer in March to eventually carry the CEO
baton.
"Since he is in charge of networks, he is the
obvious candidate to take charge of sorting
this out." offers Katayama. "Of course, if
he can't manage that the way up will be
blocked."
For the moment Hirai is getting gushing
praise from Stringer. While he was being
piped in through a video conferencing
connection into the New York roundtable
on Tuesday, Stringer described him as "very
helpful and very demonstrative." Gamers,
insisted Stringer, "like Kaz."
Yet it is difficult to think that Hirai won't
have to take some of the blame, potentially
damaging his chances of being the next CEO.
Stringer's next best choice, says an analyst,
who declined to be identified because of
the sensitivity of the issue, could be Hiroshi
Yoshioka, an executive who along with
Kunimasa Suzuki, Yoshihisa Ishida and Hirai
is a member of Sony's elite management
team, who Stringer refers to as the four
musketeers.
Yoshioka is an engineer by training and the
executive who runs Sony's non-consumer
businesses,
including
semiconductors,
batteries and other key components. The
analyst suggests he would have difficulty in
struggling to unite Sony's non-cooperating
units.
An alternative figure who may play a key
role is George Bailey. Stringer hired the
former IBM technology guru in 2009, for the
newly created post of Chief Transformation
Officer.
Bailey, who reports directly to Stringer,
was brought in to help accelerate Sony's
turnaround.
"While the groundbreaking iPod was only
launched in October 2001, Jobs initially built
a team, restructured the supply-chain and
partnered with value-chain companies,"
CLSA analyst Atul Goyal said in a report
comparing Sony and Apple. "Now, we believe
it is Bailey's turn to do the same at Sony. We
argue that Sony is just such a turnaround or
transformation story."
Whoever follows Stringer to the top of
Sony, pressure will be on the new boss to
6
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quickly exit from thin-margin or loss making
operations such as phones, televisions, and
peripheral businesses, including financial
services, analysts predict.
"I would be very focused on a narrow set of
products," advises the CEO of web security
company Symantec, Enrique Salem, also
speaking at the Reuters Summit. "If you look
at what happened at Sony over the last 15
years they've diversified their portfolio and
I would pick one or two things I wanted to
spend all of my time on to make sure they are
the very best in the market."
Another of Sony's options may be to seek
closer cooperation with U.S. Internet giant
Google.
Sony is already warming to Google's
Android operating system -- notably
partnering with the Internet search leader on
Google TV. The U.S. company could help tie
together the Japanese company's treasure
trove of content and products with Google's
software and innovation -- if that were to
happen, industry watchers argue, Sony could
then hope to take on Apple.
"It is now moving in the right direction but
does not have the luxury of time that it had 10
years back," said CLSA's Goyal.
Whoever ends up running Japan's best
known consumer electronics brand for the
next 10 years should look to give its best
people the space and flexibility to work
and think freely, advises Apple co-founder
Wozniak.
"It's kind of like the liberal arts side of the
company. The emotion, the heart has to be
as strong as the brain and the engineering.
Right now that doesn't really happen.
Companies are all based on the money guys
and who has done what before," he said.
STRINGER LEGACY
For Stringer, likely closer to the end
of his term than the beginning, the legacy he
leaves may be that of the cost cutter rather
than the renaissance man he promised to be
when he became the first foreigner to lead
the Japanese company.
With Morita, Stringer shares a colorful
past. Morita was the son of a soy sauce maker
and a former Imperial army soldier. Stringer
too served in the military, conscripted to
fight in Vietnam after he arrived in the United
States in 1964 with $100 he had earned as
a truck driver after graduating from Oxford
University.
Landing a job as a journalist at CBS after
his discharge, he eventually went on to run
the American broadcaster. He was knighted
may 2011
in 2000, an award he shares with Morita who
was made an honorary knight in 1993.
Stringer, who is described on the company
website as less of a number's guy than a
creative leader, has had successes such as
the Blu-ray optical discs victory over the
alternative format HD-DVD. Yet, Sony under
his watch has yet to find the game changer
able to wow consumers like an iPhone or an
iPad.
Unlike Morita, remembered as the
creative force behind the Walkman, Trinitron
televisions and other hits that made his
company a household name, or hands-on
innovator Jobs, Stringer has been happy to
let others show off the goods.
Jobs, a consummate salesman has
personally launched most of Apple's most
successful products over the past decade.
Stringer on the other hand was not present at
the launch of either of Sony's most important
products of recent years, its new hand-held
game device and the tablet computers it
hopes can claim top spot behind Apple's
iPad.
In the absence of any must-have gadget
emerging from Sony's labs, Stringer has
not been squeamish about cutting fat to lift
the company's bottom line, a strategy that
has delivered results for him throughout his
career from CBS onwards.
"Stringer cut fixed costs especially for
production sites, making Sony more resilient
to stagnant revenue growth," said Yasuo
Nakane, an analyst at Deutsche Securities in
Tokyo. It has allowed him to keep pace with
productivity improvements at rivals such as
LG and Samsung.
Before taking over as CEO, Stringer had
burnished his belt-tightening reputation by
cutting $700 million in expenses at Sony's
U.S. operations. More recently, in 2009,
as Sony struggled during the post Lehman
shock recession, he pared $3 billion more off
Sony's costs by laying off 16,000 workers and
halving the number of suppliers it uses to
1,200 companies.
Prudent management, however, isn't
enough to lift the despair that has descended
not just on Sony but on some other major
companies in deflation-ravaged Japan since
the bubble burst two decades ago.
In its May edition, Japan's Bungei Shunju,
a widely read current affairs magazine,
lamented the demise of Sony in a piece
quoting an engineer who had left for a rival
consumer electronics firm.
"It's obvious the days will never again come
when we marveled at the quality of sound
from a Sony FM radio, or the beauty of the
images on a Trinitron TV, or the inspiration
of the Walkman," the magazine wailed. "We
shouldn't expect Sony to shine as it once did."
Pondering Sony's future again over his
dumplings in Tokyo, Airboard creator Maeda
is equally as glum. "I don't think Sony can
change," he says. Not unless, he adds, "Sony
has a leader like Steve Jobs."
(Reporting by Tim Kelly, Isabel Reynolds
and Nathan Layne in Tokyo, Kenneth Li and
Liana Baker in New York, Poornima Gupta
in San Francisco and Jim Finkle in Boston.
Editing by Martin Howell in New York)
7
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may 2011
Rob Glaser (Left), Chairman of RealNetworks, Anne Bouverot (Center), head of mobile services at Orange, and Enrique Salem (Right), president and CEO of Symantec
speak during the Reuters Global Technology Summit in New York and Paris, May 17-18, 2011. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid/john schults
Technology Executives: How would they fix Sony?
By bill rigby
PARIS/NEW YORK, May 23
E
xecutives and officials from
the technology industry joined Reuters
reporters at the Technology Summit in Paris
and New York last week. They were asked
how they would fix Sony. Here are some of
their responses:
ROB GLASER, CHAIRMAN, REAL
NETWORKS, and VENTURE PARTNER
AT ACCEL PARTNERS
"Sony had a very siloed model of
innovation. You had the Walkman team,
you had the team doing PlayStation, you
had the Trinitron TV group."
"In the modern era, being as siloed as
they are creates a disadvantage in this
connected world. Apple is the extreme
other example. Jobs used the force of his
personality to make people work together
to make sure that when a new version of iOS
comes out it works really well on iPhones
and iPads."
"Apple's been able to forge this culture
where all these pieces work together in
harmony, and Sony's at the other end of the
spectrum where they have this very siloed
culture."
"Howard Stringer has talked openly
about this. One of the things he's tried to
do, coming in as a Westerner, is to change
that culture, and it's super hard."
"You look at these huge company
reinventions, and I would say the same
would be true of Nokia, when the world
changes and you have a set of assets that
were incredibly valuable in the old world,
but in the new world you have to completely
reinvent what you are doing, massive scale
becomes a disadvantage."
"At that scale, it's like introducing
capitalism into a Soviet Bloc country after
50 years of communism."
JEN-HSUN HUANG, CEO OF CHIP
DESIGNER NVIDIA
"The world for consumer electronics has
changed. It used to be about the device
today it's really about the service."
"All of my colleagues at Sony are obsessed
about bringing a software sensibility into
that company."
"I think they are making that
transformation. As a large company it takes
a little bit more time."
ENRIQUE SALEM, CEO OF SOFTWARE
MAKER SYMANTEC CORP.
"Sony has a great brand. Let's not lose
sight of its iconic consumer brand."
"I would be very focused on a narrower set
of products. If you look at what's happened
at Sony over the last 15 years, they've
diversified their portfolio and I would pick
one or two things I wanted to spend all of
my time on, to make sure they are the very
best in the market."
"They do have some pretty impressive
SUMMIT
For other news from the Reuters Global
Technology Summit, click on:
http://link.reuters.com/meq69r
technologies. the Sony Vaio was as effective
as the MacBook Air. They just need to pick a
few to focus on."
"PlayStation could be the central point
of the home entertainment system and
they've put a lot of resources into that."
ANNE BOUVEROT, HEAD OF MOBILE
SERVICES, ORANGE
"I think this is a difficult subject, and I
wouldn't pretend that we know best. But
I think it's incredibly important that when
you handle customer data, whatever your
business, it's very important to have strong
processes and good security rules in terms
of how you use this data."
"I believe that this is something that
we as operators are very careful about,
because we know the level of sensitivity
that is associated with that.
"We can not say that we will never have
issues like that, but it's about processes,
about rules and then it's about reacting
in terms of communicating about the
major crisis which can happen regarding
security. And in the end it's about how you
communicate with the consumers."
(Editing by Martin Howell in New York)
8
sony
may 2011
A man walks past a
Sony logo in front of an
electronic shop in Tokyo
May 3, 2011. REUTERS/
Kim Kyung-Hoon
COVER PHOTO: Sony's personal IT television called "airboard" is shown at the launch of the information device at a Sony showroom in Tokyo September 28, 2000.
REUTERS/Toshiyuki Aizawa
For more information contact:
Isabel Reynolds,
Technology Correspondent
+813 6441 1883
[email protected]
Nathan Layne,
Bureau Chief, Japan
+81 3 6441 1801
[email protected]
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Kenneth Li,
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