Sony's New CEO To Look Beyond Hardware 178
angry tapir writes "Sony's new CEO says the company needs to move on from its hardware roots. From its inception, the company has defined itself through its gadget lines — Walkman, Vaio, Cyber-shot, PlayStation — but incoming CEO Kazuo Hirai, who will officially lead the company from April, says Sony must now focus more on the software and platforms they access. He said he wants to model the company after its successful PlayStation gaming business, which he helped turn around, where 'hardware drives software, and software drives hardware, and it's all tied in by the network.' Sony is forecasting nearly US$3 billion in losses for the fiscal year through March."
It's not going to work (Score:5, Insightful)
Sony is just too conservative and unwilling to invest to be successful in the software business. 90% of their time will be spent locking down systems and adding DRM. They won't build what the customer wants.
Ok (Score:5, Insightful)
Hardware is becoming generic and software is becoming critical. Software should at least be a big part of the plan. Sounds reasonable enough to me.
I'd rage about Sony evilness ... but that would be offtopic (and I'm sure there will be plenty of that anyway by people much more serious about it than me!).
Re:It's not going to work (Score:4, Insightful)
Well yea (Score:2, Insightful)
overpriced, underspecced. (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe Sony hardware used to be worth the premium, way back when, but nowadays they are just trading on their reputation.
I had a Sony Viao laptop for years. It was OK, nothing wrong with it, but equally there was nothing so amazingly right with it that it was worth the huge pricetag - the same spec laptop with another brand label on it would have been just as good at 2/3 the price. It's a shame, because there is room in a market for a gadget manufacturer that sets itself apart from the competition by offering superior reliability / build quality / robustness.
I think customers have been catching on to this the last few years, and Sony's hardware sales have dropped as a result.
Sony: (Score:5, Insightful)
And he's right... (Score:5, Insightful)
And he's right. In the long term, and that might be another couple of generations, game consoles will be terminals, TV's were dumb terminals and need to be made smart, smartphones can't distinguish themselves from one another if they are all basically the same hardware and software.
Hardware is a bad business to be in. There is becoming less and less of a need for a lot of different foundries, sure there will be some world wide but they are, by and large, astronomically expensive and need to have multiple customers, this is your TSMC, Intel, AMD etc. Given that, Sony, along with everyone else, is buying from them. That means your differentiation comes from what you run on the hardware, not what the hardware is.
Sony *should* own some major portion of the mobile market place. But it doesn't. It has just another android phone basically x10. The PS vita should be *the* premium android phone right now. But it isn't. That's a software and a vision problem, not hardware problem. Because what does a Sony smartphone bring to the table with software?
Sony *should* have a secure, reliable network that people can trust to buy movies music and games on, and that will be up 'all the time' (within reason of course), and, given the PSN outages last year, that isn't the case.
The future for Sony is smart boxes that go with (or inside) dumb boxes, and link up to their smart software services. TV on demand, on your TV, or PS1, 2, 3 or 4 games, all over the net. That may mean running their own cloud backend. But it's still known hardware problems solved with engaging software that's better than the other guy, not shitty software with somehow innovative hardware, because there's not a lot to innovate on the hardware.
In other words, they're largely a consumer facing version of IBM or HP. I'm sure they have, and could do more with the battery/chemicals business and so on, the backend may be boring tech but it can be useful. They can make TV's that use 70% less power for example. But pitching that to consumers requires informed consumers, and most of us, about most of the technology we use, aren't, or at least aren't informed enough for things like a TV that uses 70% less power, but costs 2x as much to even know if that's a worthwhile deal. They could, I suppose, choose to radically reinvest in something else, solar power, that kind of thing, but most of their innovation has been in content distribution (floppy disks, CD's, DVD's, Blu Ray, the whole gaming business etc.) and content delivery at that level is now a networking infrastructure problem.
Re:Samsung is the new Sony (Score:4, Insightful)
Samsung, by contrast, had a 30,000 Sq.Ft. booth filled to the rim with gadgets and TVs.
And that's one of the big problems. 1500 different cell phones, monitors, computers, etc. All with exciting names like Sony XV-20039clb (now with tint control!).
It all gets lost in the ozone and long chain monomer haze. We don't need thousands more products, we need better ones.
Re:Sony: (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Samsung is the new Sony (Score:4, Insightful)
Step Number One (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's not going to work (Score:5, Insightful)
I know it's popular to call Apple "a marketing company" around here, but it's gotten ridiculous. What started as a very sarcastic cheap shot has somehow become an accepted truth. Last time I checked, Apple makes their money by selling computers, phones, and other hardware. They make a little off software, too. I'm pretty sure if Apple somehow lost their iPhone market, they wouldn't be able to offset the loss by selling t-shirts with their logo on it.
But, yes, Sony could learn a lot from Apple's marketing strategies.
Re:Why not? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think many consumers are aware of the rootkit fiasco. Some time ago, I spoke to someone who worked for Sony, selling professional TV studio equipment -- he had not heard of the rootkit fiasco. If the employees haven't heard of the issue, why would the general population?
On the other hand, Sony used to build premium products and charge premium prices for them. I recall reading (during the late '80s I think) that Sony was the most valuable brand name in the world. Now they build cr*p and still charge premium prices. They also make those devices even more expensive for consumers by using proprietary add-ons such as Sony memory sticks. Consumers have started to notice those things. Sony was living off its valuable brand name for years, but now that train has hit the buffers.
Re:It's not going to work (Score:4, Insightful)
They're also good at marketing, but their approach there is not recent and was not enough initially to have mass appeal --- although you can say they had a cult following from the early days, just much more limited.
The difference between the early days and now is not so much in the Apple approach, but in the price points they can target and people attitude.
Shielding people for low level tech details used to be a very expensive thing in the early days of the Mac, and few could afford it. Nowadays providing a nice user experience is a multimedia player, then a smartphone or tablet, can be done at a lower price point. Even if Apple is often seen as more expensive, it's still affordable to more and more people. Their computers too are more affordable than in days past. So they can reach more people.
At the same time, technology is more and more pervasive. We (/.) may get a kick out of it and enjoy all those new nice toys and don't care about getting our hands dirty. But most people are mightily confused and frustrated and bored. So they're more and more receptive to easy products, that allows them to get their things down with minimal fuss and understanding of the underlying technology. Nobody likes to feel backward or stupid and be frustrated in front of a high tech product they don't know how to use properly. Apple offer a product they get, and they feel good about it. That creates a lot of loyalty among technophobic people, and even among people who could handle it, but don't want to bother because they have other things to do.
That's IMHO the combination of both that gives the current Apple boom. As I see it these two trends are here to stay, so Apple will stay high until other companies manage to shield people from high tech complications as well as Apple but at a lower price point.