When news hit this week about Sony's huge losses and massive layoffs, it showed how far the once-popular brand has fallen -- but it's easy to forget that Sony was once the gold standard consumer electronics brand.
Perhaps Apple should pay attention.
First, a look at the ugly numbers: Sony announced this week a stunning year-end loss of $6.4 billion (its fiscal year ended March 31). As CNet reported, Sony originally was predicting a $2.7 billion loss, then dropped the bombshell with the actual number, which was almost 2.5 times larger than the original estimate.
Before flat screens came along, people bought Sony TVs. Heck, I had two of them in my house. Today, I have a Samsung and an LG, both South Korean brands that have been eating Sony's lunch for years.
But it wasn't just TVs. There was a total failure on the part of Sony (except perhaps with the PlayStation) to take advantage of the market changes over the last decade, whether those changes were in mobile phones, MP3 players, laptops, or tablets. Apple swooped in during this time, creating products people wanted. And while Apple soared, Sony plunged.
Remember the Sony Walkman? Long before the Apple iPod, the Walkman was the original portable music player and it was an unprecedented star at the time. Yet for some reason, Sony was never able to translate that original popularity to MP3 players.
Sony teamed up with Ericsson in the mobile phone market, but that never went anywhere.
Before the MacBook, Sony Vaios were a popular choice for laptop buyers. I still have an old one on the floor of my office I bought in the early 2000s. Once the MacBook came along, though, Vaios faded along with other Sony products.
New brands filled the void left by Sony's inability to maintain its brand dominance.
Today, Apple sits at the top of the consumer electronics brand heap, along with the previously mentioned South Korean offerings. Maybe these brands should take heed, especially Apple.
That's because it's easy for large corporations to grow complacent, to look at their lofty cash balances and their dominant market share, and think that the brand name alone will keep them on top.
As Sony has learned, that is simply not the case. Apple and Samsung and other top consumer electronics brands of today have to stay focused on making good products, or perhaps some Chinese or Indian brand will supplant them. Or maybe some company we consider an also-ran today (much as Apple was considered in the late 90s) will suddenly reinvent itself and go lunging for the throats of these popular brands.
Sony's decline should be an object lesson for all brands: Change with the market, or you could be facing a similar precipitous drop. It happened to Sony. It can happen to any brand.
Pads, phones, even ultrabooks...these things are the pens and papers of today.
They should be ubiquitous. We should be able to into Wal*Greens and get a few from a bin.
We have to defocus from paying all this attention to Pocket Calculators and get back to thinking about software, networking, context, knowledge search.
Interesting, Jabailo. I am sure that's the effect Amazon is hoping to bring about with Kindle Fire - sell it cheap to the millions who just want a basic entertainment platform and leave Apple with a small and shrinking niche audience of people who want more sophisticated tablets. Is the same thing happening with smartphones?
The problem of Apple and other former consumer electronic front runners is that ultimately they are all basically pocket calculator makers.
Remember the Caculator Bust of the early 80s? No.
Well, when I was in high school (Archbishop Molloy Class of 1978, Go Stanners, Non scholae, sed vitae) I started doing my math using a slide rule and ended using a pocket calculator. As the pocket calculator took off companies such as HP produced beautifully crafted, highly functional handheld computers essentially.
Some of them had programming capabilties in which you could store programs on small magnetic cards. Every engineer of that time loved the trapezoidal buttons and great feel of the HP calculators of course. The prices went up, up, up, with each new feature set, $100, $300, $500. Premium calculators.
But then...in a few short years, someone figured out how to make a fully featured calculator, with a solar cell, and be able to put it on sale for $8 right next to the cash register on your way out of the supermarket!
We've seen this with digital cameras, recording devices. Any type of hardware is ultimately definiable and hence optimizable and the follow up is crashing profit margins.
Well if anything this illustrates that the consumer electronics industry is a dangerous and mercurial playing ground. Is it any wonder that there are few or none reading this that has a IBM logo anywhere in their home.
Sharon
I would just go to a store like Best Buy and have a look at the different brands and buy the one with the picture and features you like best, regardless of the brand. Prices have dropped for models under 40 inches.
because until this week I'd had it in my head that Sony was still doing well and I was thinking in terms of going for Sony when I upgraded my tv and so on. Are their products still considered to be high quality for what they are? I hadn't heard anything otherwise.
How did sony fail to track the trend in the industry and thus loose their grip on the market. since when did they begin to think their name alone was enough?
Their story is a shame but as you write, its more importantly a lesson to all in the industry.
I agree that it may be too soon to lavish praise on Tim Cook for a job well done. But he certainly hasn't blown too many fuses. and hasn't tried to glaum on to the Job legacy for his own gain.
That's true to an extent, but Apple never really achieved major success in the past, certainly not anything on par with what it has accomplished over the last decade. You can't put Sony's failure on Apple though. Apple did put out great products, but Sony really just did nothing. It put out crap and wondered why nobody bought it.
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Recently, the Obama administration has been of two minds where privacy rights are concerned. On one hand, you have an administration that vowed to veto CISPA and mandated open data for government websites. On the other hand, you have an increasingly out-of-control Department of Justice on a fishing expedition at AP and demanding legislation to let the FBI wiretap private, encrypted communications and levy fines if a company fails to comply.
These days, even some usually techno-friendly people have their hackles up about the potential of Google Glass to surreptitiously record video or take pictures. I've heard more than one tech savvy friend bring up "the creep factor," the ability of a weird guy to secretly record you.
Last year as you may recall, the Internet community rallied and prevented the passage of SOPA/PIPA legislation. CISPA, another piece of legislation that targeted Internet freedom, also died. However, one proposed law that failed in 2012 has been revived this year. And it appears forces are not now lining up against CISPA with the same enthusiasm as last time.
You might be surprised to learn that the FBI has generated hundreds of thousands of secret information requests since 2000, many of which go to Internet companies seeking information about individual users. You may be even more surprised to discover that in all those years, only one Internet company has challenged these secret requests.
Late Friday I learned I had been chosen to participate in the Google Glass Explorer's program, a group selected to take the first-generation of Google Glass out in the world and report back on how they're using the devices.
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New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
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Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
Subsidized handsets, rather than locked handsets, should be the focus of regulators. We're not getting good deals, not fostering innovation, and weakening our power as buyers.
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