Japan's consumer electronics industry is dying, Sony's former chief says.

[wraggster]

News via BBC

Consumer electronics firms in Japan needed to merge and adapt to a world where the TV was becoming a portal to the internet, Nobuyuki Idei said.

Mr Idei, who is still chief corporate adviser to the company, said Sony had suffered from high costs during a period of global competition.

Meanwhile, other countries' firms had powered ahead - with Korean firms in particular winning new business.

Caught out

In a frank interview at the European Technology Round Table in Barcelona, Nobuyuki Idei explained what had gone wrong during his 10-year tenure at the helm of Sony.

Mr Idei ran Sony from 1995 to 2005 - a period when the Japanese giant's fortunes suffered, with its finances faltering and rival products such Microsoft's Xbox and Apple's iPod eating into its reputation for world-beating innovation.

Asked to explain why Sony had been caught out by the iPod's success, he said that Apple chief Steve Jobs liked Sony and had studied its record carefully.

"He'd have probably liked to be Sony's CEO," he said.

Mr Idei said he hoped Sony's next chief would be younger

The success of Microsoft's Xbox 360 games console in beating Sony's Playstation 3 to market was because "Microsoft is not a technology company", he said.

Sony, he explained, had gone down the route of developing a new processor with IBM for the PS3 and that had caused delays.

Hollywood mistake

Mr Idei also cast doubt on whether it had ever been a good idea for Sony to get involved in Hollywood through its acquisition of Columbia pictures in 1989.

"The mistake was to buy the company," he said.

Last year Sony appointed Welsh-born Sir Howard Stringer, as the company's first non-Japanese chief executive.

Asked whether that was the right decision, Mr Idei said: "I think so."

But he went on to express his hope that the next chief executive would be a younger Japanese manager, someone he described as "a net citizen".

Mr Idei said Sir Howard had retained his Welsh sense of humour.

Japanese executives were studying how to understand his jokes, he said - "but Welsh humour is very difficult to understand."

[NoQuarter]

The times are a changin,especially as far as software and the net is concerned.

[werpu]

Sony has one huge problem, the media division, it is not a problem financially, but it is a problem for the electronics division. Almost every problem the electronics division has faced in the past was indirectly caused by the overly paranoia of the media division. Lets give it a list:
a) Minidisk did not take over, due to high costs, sort of analog drm, and to late to the market for pc drives, add to that that Atrac basically lost to the freely available mp3

b) Sony MP3 players, crippled by rigourous drm until they lost the market

c) Sony DVD players, nobody bought their region coded high priced players anymore while next on the shelf was one, playing every format on the earth and also was region free, they killed them out of the dvd market that way

d) psp, the UMD did not take off, too expensive, too much drm

e)PS3, simply priced out of the market thanks to enforced blue ray which is two years to early and will be a questionable success due to draconian drm

Sony has two chances to survive, either kill or sell off the electronics division or kill or sell off the media division, but both together cannot survive.

[bobbertson]

The Welsh language is hard to understand, so maybe he shouldn't be speaking Welsh to the Japanese.

[daninski]

:P i'm welsh and there's nothing wrong with our sense of humor. speaking welsh to them is definitely funny.

[doverkiller]

I hate welsh anyway..
just kidding..

[the_eternal_dark]

Sony has one huge problem, the media division, it is not a problem financially, but it is a problem for the electronics division. Almost every problem the electronics division has faced in the past was indirectly caused by the overly paranoia of the media division. Lets give it a list:
a) Minidisk did not take over, due to high costs, sort of analog drm, and to late to the market for pc drives, add to that that Atrac basically lost to the freely available mp3

b) Sony MP3 players, crippled by rigourous drm until they lost the market

c) Sony DVD players, nobody bought their region coded high priced players anymore while next on the shelf was one, playing every format on the earth and also was region free, they killed them out of the dvd market that way

d) psp, the UMD did not take off, too expensive, too much drm

e)PS3, simply priced out of the market thanks to enforced blue ray which is two years to early and will be a questionable success due to draconian drm

Sony has two chances to survive, either kill or sell off the electronics division or kill or sell off the media division, but both together cannot survive.

Right on with that. Why can't Sony do it all, but price the media cheaper than the competion media in the market. That just makes too much sense.

[Basil Zero]

it was eventually gonna happen anyways