Sony to Exit Notebook Market?

I think of MacBook Pros as being pretty heavy--heavier than you'd expect given their thinness. For example, even though a Vaio F22 is about twice as thick as a MacBook Pro 15, AND bigger in other dimensions (thanks to the 16.4" screen), I think it's only about a pound heavier. The F22 is lighter than you'd think when you see it sitting on a desk, and the MBP 15 is heavier than you'd think when you see it sitting on a desk.

 

Not sure entirely what your points are, but this much is clear:

1) The Japanese model of the "trading company" has long existed so that each entity had it's own "kingdom." In this respect, Sony is the smallest and least diversified among the major Japanese companies in this vein: Fuji, Toyota, etc.

2) This model has led to what economists call the "lost decade" for the entire Japanese economy: it didn't budge between 1990 and 2000. Things hae only changed a small amount since.

3) Sony may be diversified, but check out its annual report and you'll see that it is losing market share and money in nearly all of its market segments - and in ALL of the Sony-branded ones people know.

Finally, it's true that the structure of Japanese companies makes it harder for them to be taken over, but that is entirely to the detriment of their shareholders and their brands - the ship will sooner go down than to have management forced to divest brands that other companies could do a far better job of managing and rebuilding.

Ever wonder why 20 years ago every major newspaper article spoke of Japan taking over the US as the world leader in all major business segments, yet now there isn't a single Japanese brand - other than in autos - that leads the market?

Ach! What does this have to do with the fact that Sony is going to lose all impact in the electronics industry because they treat their customers with disrespect bordering on hostility? That's what this thread is supposed to be about!

 

This thread is sourced from a news article bordering on insanity Anything is a green light go. Of course, you believe Sony is dying, while I don't, lol.

Go further into geopolitics. Find out why Japan-USA-Korea (and because of Japan, Taiwan) have one messed up relationship. If it helps refute you futher, Toyota is among the top three auto makers (in terms of market share... worldwide). The other two are an US Gov't owned company, and the German Volkswagen - and the main reason why Toyota is behind this year (after leading for quite a while) is directly due to supply problems (march earthquake).

 

That was the whole idea. The only reason for my posting that Forbes article was to spur overall discussion on Sony's direction and quality.

 

Louche, I salute you for starting this thread and agree entirely with your objectives. I also have to concede to jeremyshaw that some, myself most definitely included have taken the thread in directions beyond your intended scope, possibly diluting the real value you intended to create here.

Thus I have created this new thread: http://forum.notebookreview.com/son...ort-please-stay-constructive.html#post7889366 to take the customer support gripes off of this thread - which I believe is meant to stimulate intelligent discussion Sony's future business and marketing position and that of its brand, overall - and still provide a clearly needed place to speak more directly to customer support problems that appear nearly rampant and, not unrelated to these, the confusing and frustrating brand/product positioning/pricing that is, for example, setting expectations at levels Sony is rarely prepared to meet.

As ever, alternate suggestions are most welcomed.

Based on NBR threads alone, I have never experienced a technology brand that creates such strong feelings - pro and con - among its user base. Normally, if a company fails over and over to produce good products and support them well, the market "votes" with it's wallet and losers, well, lose! But clearly Sony has grabbed its customers' emotional attachments in ways that caused people to refuse to go elsewhere, yet demand the quality and support - even the design decisions they think Sony got wrong: eg, look at how many people are truly " angry" at Sony for choosing the Z2's two-piece design, making it very difficult to feel comfortable parting with $2-$5,000 for a product that just doesn't get it right, but doing just that is what the devotees are insisting Sony do; and case 2: the SA: customers are clearly angry - not just disappointed, as most would be, and then buy elsewhere - that Sony refused to create a premium screen option as a worthy successor to the Z1 - a full-featured, DTR with premium display, internal gpu, even a DVD drive, all at under 3.5 lbs!

Well, as usual I drone on and on. But Louche has touched a nerve with this thread and I an others have sparked some great debates, and I'd hate to see them deteriorate into "food fights" and that is why I am trying to introduce some order in to pending chaos.

You (NBR's Sony members) are a very passionate, knowledgeable and overall impressive group, and your views and analysis are extremely enlightening - and sometimes hilarious!

 

@jeremyshaw: separate and apart from the other stuff, I have to compliment you on two things:

1) You are right that the problems of global corporations, like Sony, is as much tied to geopolitical problems as anything related to business strategy (though I would add that Toyota's arrogant reaction to what was probably not a "real" brake problem, lost them more market share points than the earthquake supply disruption, and those points will be harder to win back)

2) Of all the frustrating options of Sony's first line of Sandy Bridge ultraportables, I think you made by far and away the best choice getting the SC: essentially 100% of the virtues of the S line at lest than 50% of the cost of the SA, and all you sacrificed was a bit higher resolution screen that was of no greater quality to the one you got and some metal casing where yours is plastic (ever wonder what the generic name for "carbon fiber composite material" is? Plastic!) You are no doubt enjoying a machine that surpasses the Z1 in every way except the screen (which no amount of $ will buy you in a current Sony model that has all the features inside one box!) and got a blu ray player and free Net Gear WIDI receiver, all for, like, $950!

The #2 point relates to this thread how? Well, it shows how an intelligent Sony customer, who may well have been upsold to a $2,000 Sony Vaio, wisely found the sweet spot Sony unintentionally created. Great deal for jeremy; bad future for Sony!

 

... don't stop me from loving your Z1 It's the one superlaptop (gonna steal that phrase from somewhere else), which simply ignored many common-minded limits, to produce the best possible laptop, IMO.


though I think the media had more to do with that. The last report of the liar in a Prius (accelerator) really helped clear them (IMO, I am probably wrong, lol).

 

I give up on editing my post above. IE9 hates NBR for some reason, and it's what I use for work, lol.

 

I'm old enough to have lost $10,000 in resale value on my Audi because of the infamous "unintended acceleration" stories hit 60 Minutes, and no amount of retractions would change public opinion - for over 10 years, in Audi's case!

 

I don't know if anyone is paying attention to this thread anymore, but I just stumbled upon this short article, from which I will quote just a few short pieces, because it so perfectly addresses the root of the problem we have been debating:

(After 3D TV Flop Sony Now Banking On Tablets & TVs To Save Them - Channel News)

After 3D TV Flop Sony Now Banking On Tablets & TVs To Save Them By Wire Service

Sony, who this time last year was telling analysts that their future lay in 3D TV technology, has had a change of heart after the technology flopped. The company is now banking on Android tablets in a move that will force them to compete head on with Samsung, holders of major market share in TVs and Android tablets.

According to struggling Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer, the Japanese company's two new tablets - including an ‘S' and ‘P' model - one a 9.4" tablet and the other featuring two screens that fold together are "set to be a key part of their future success"

He said that the company has been ‘flattened, flooded, hacked and singed' during the past 12 months. He blamed their problems not on a lack of innovative products, but on the Japanese tsunami, a PlayStation ‘crisis' and the London riots.

Speaking at this year's IFA show in Berlin, Sir Howard said Sony was finally ready to "re-engage". He announced the pricing of the two new model tablets are priced at $579 for a 16GB version of the S model and $689 for a 32GB version. The US prices of the same tablets are $499 and $599 respectively and are entering a crowded market of tablets based on Google's Android operating system, whose sum total has been called ‘little more than a rounding error' when compared to iPad sales.

The Daily Telegraph in the UK said that Sony's coverage of its business is still dominated by television sales: the only division of the company that is not making a profit. There's even been talk among commentators of the firm exiting the TV market altogether.

Kazuo Hirai, Sir Howard's right-hand man and executive vice president was clear about the company's TV aspirations: "We are not leaving the TV business, we are not thinking of leaving the TV business, and we are not talking about it either". Sir Howard himself talked of transforming Sony over the last five years "from an analogue company to a digital one". Now, he says, it is set "to use content as a weapon".

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Well maybe not as short as I intended, but all of this was so funny and scary at the same time that I had to include it! (Disclosure: in 1994 I briefly worked for a joint venture between Bell Atlantic, 2 other phone companies and a bevvy of content companies to bring what was, well, let's just say they were dreaming of FIOS, some 10 years before the technology and economics made such a service imaginable. Feeling that none of the phone company execs new enough about media - both old and new - they undertook a corporate search, paid a leading firm $300,000 and found their savior: Howard Stringer, then the CEO of CBS TV [he had not yet been knighted, and he had never worked outside of traditional TV.] In his first speech to the 300 "best and brightest" from the new media world that Bell Atlantic had, admirably, brought on board to lead this old phone company into the 21st century, Howie's message was, again, as funny as it was chilling - to those who valued their jobs! The crux of it was: "I've never even turned on a computer and don't intend to; what I know is television, and that is the future for this company, ironically re-christened "Tele-TV!")

The String-man was fired and the entire division cratered 6 mos later. 17 years later, he has probably earned at least $100 million personally, presiding over the destruction of the greatest brands in media in the 20th century: Sony.

Those who fail to learn from history....are [likely to become knighted, and then made fabulously wealthy destroying the fortunes and jobs of hundreds of thousands of people and taking down two companies in the process]

sigh...

 

lol. Now I think Sony is in trouble

not only that, their panel business is going into a massive (*near*) pan-Japan collab effort... in order to compete vs two Korean companies.

 

I just don't know why Sony (and Nintendo for that matter) put so much effort on 3-D.. I thought it was obvious it wasn't such a great idea and a fad.. most of my friends either were indifferent to 3D or had headaches from it.. when I lived in Japan.. very few people went up to the many 3D displays Sony put all over Tokyo.. and I think most found the requirement of wearing an additional glasses to view it, as too bothersome.
The two new tablets they released as well.. I just don't see the logic behind them. Different they are... but who wants a tablet that's split into two screens.. too small to spend long periods with.. too big to be portable like a phone or ipod touch..

 

Wow. I remember visiting Bell Atlantic somewhere around that time and being given a demo of a video on demand service. I thought it was pretty cool but nothing came of it at the time. I occasionally wondered about what happened to it.

 

I just may have been the one who gave you the demo! We had a very sophisticated digital production studio for the time - one that could be assembled with off the shelf software and less than $5k of hardware today! We did a trial of crude VOD in Northern Virginia over copper wire using a technology no one had employed before: ADSL, which stood for Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Loop, later re-born as "DSL," the first true broadband Internet Service provided first by, you guessed it, Bell Atlantic! The problem with the objective of having a fully featured two-way broadband service with "500 channels," unlimited content on demand, shopping via TV (the forerunner to Internet ecommerce) was that there was no WWW at the time and the speeds were too slow for most of the services. More than anything, the cost per home to install it was over $1,000! And that was still for broadband over twisted pair copper wire and the maximum speed was about 256k, and that was only for homes less than 1.7 miles from a telco central office. To show how nuts a corporation can be, Bell Atlantic announced plans to run fiber to the home throughout its 5 state area over the next 5 years - 1995-2000. The cost of that, plus the combination of massive centralized servers for all the content and super expensive set top boxes, rose to about 10,000 per home served. Finally, someone listened to the financial guys, who showed that the payback on the investment with the technology available at the time was...150 years!!!

Thanks for giving me a little walk down memory lane. If you were involved in this from a different aspect or want to talk more, feel free to PM me.

As for Sony and its prospects...let's just say that Howard Stringer hasn't been associated with a success in "new media" since the term was coined. Now we just call it "media," and with the likes of Apple, Google, Samsung and others playing hardball, Sony's only chance of remaining as anything more than small fraction of its former (or even present) self is by hiring someone away from one of the major players and going to the capital markets to raise a couple hundred million dollars and re-inventing itself. On its present course, I'm afraid it's on a fast track towards the graveyard of great brands that are now little more than the subject of this kind of nostalgic story telling. Sure, they have a little time, but if they don't start reversing course now, the die is cast for a very sad future for a once-famous brand!