Sir Howard Stringer Shakes Up Sony

COMMENTS (4)

• He should take a long hard look at the television division. There is a tremendous amount of dead weight – especially in Marketing. Run by a moron.

  Comment by Anonymous — Friday February 27, 2009 @ 12:26pm PST  Reply to this post

• Hi Nikki,

  I assume you’re not much of a games player, but the PS3 isn’t thought of as a definitive screw-up yet!

  Not a fanboy, but its starting to gain momentum with its own 1st-party titles, plus has multiple revenue streams.

  Also, he won’t get called out on that loss, as all the consumer electronics companies of Asia are also suffering, plus it’s still re-organising.

  Kind regards,

  Shakir Razak

  Comment by Shakir Razak — Friday February 27, 2009 @ 2:41pm PST  Reply to this post

• Sir Howard sold the studios a bill-of-goods about how PS3 was going to be the “Trojan Horse” for Blu-ray. Had we only known… Now the reality sets in that Blu-ray is at best a interim technology, unlikely to every achieve anywhere near the consumer adoption needed. He was smooth. We were duped.

  Comment by Jim — Saturday February 28, 2009 @ 5:30am PST  Reply to this post

• No offense. You were not “duped” — the industry behaved in a patently idiotic way.

  The studios assumed that the PS2 was behind the success of DVD rather than the reverse — not smart.

  Second, while there are any number of Blu-Ray lovers out there who will sight technical statistics as proof that it is the better piece of tech, the truth is that HD-DVD was the superior system at time of release. Not better, per se, but superior — in the same way that iTunes is not “better” than SACD but still superior in terms of cost, availability, usability, and price to performance.

  Had iTunes been shut out. Music would be dead. SACD would have killed it off.

  Any real analysis of the situation would have borne out that PS3 was both late to the next-gen console race, unduly conflated into statistics of total Blu-Ray player numbers — a game system and a set top box are not the same thing — and hideously over-priced both in and of itself and in terms of total licensing requirements.

  This was not tough.

  BTW,

  I really like the PS3. I think it is a load of fun. It was just no reason to throw away HD-DVD which had the price point and feature set (at launch) capable of extending optical media for a few more precious years.

  Comment by RIM — Sunday March 8, 2009 @ 1:02am PST  Reply to this post