Belated birthday wishes to Sony Corporation, that seller of songs and movies, purveyor of consumer electronics as well as all things Walkman and PlayStation. The company turned 60 years old a few months ago and is the subject of a kind of upbeat retrospective by the news site Japan Today.
The article, which is entitled Sony at 60, talks to some of Sony’s past glories such as Trinitron, Walkman and Vaio, makes note of current successes like Cyber-shot T-9, the Walkman W42S phone, PlayStation 2 and the PlayStation Portable and the Sony Bravia V line of LCD TVs, and concludes on a hopeful note re Sony’s upcoming PlayStation 3 game platform and it’s co-fated Blu-ray optical disk technology.
Some, however, believe that the PS3 is overpriced and that Blu-ray will not gain acceptance because of lack of backward compatibility with today’s prevailing DVD format. That clouds Sony’s future and raises the possibility of a slow corporate demise likely via dismemberment. Sony’s done well to exceed the average corporate life expectancy, which seems to be about fifty years. Some factors that militate against Sony seeing seventy include the loss of the founder’s vision and drive, selection of an historian as CEO (albeit an over-achieving historian), Japan’s low birth rate, a seeming lack of interest in the technology of technology in Japan, and that generalized sense of corporate ennui engendered by over-achievement.
SONY at 60 – Japan Today, July 7, 2006
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