New Sony CEO Stringer's expertise is confined to the two little grey boxes (see second figure below) labeled "movies and television" and "music".
Times: Samsung has become what Sony could once claim - the competitor with both the breadth of products and the appeal of a premium brand.
This rapid reversal of fortunes illustrates the highly competitive world of consumer electronics that Sir Howard, a media man, is entering. Complacency and coasting on best-selling products have contributed to a nearly 75 percent decline in Sony's stock value since its March 1, 2000, peak. The invincible "factory of ideas" founded almost six decades ago by Akio Morita, the company that brought the world the transistor radio, the Walkman and the Trinitron television tube, seems to have lost its way.
"Samsung is now the anti-Sony," George Gilder, an American technology analyst, said here Wednesday. "Sony is layered with bureaucracy. The amazing thing about Samsung is that it is like Apple with Steve Jobs involved in designing the iPod, it is like Sony with Morita deeply involved in developing products."
Samsung has kept a lean corporate structure, with authority increasingly delegated to front-line managers around the world, and almost a quarter of the far-flung staff of 88,000 dedicated to research and development.
But in Monday's boardroom purge, Sony demoted the one engineer credited with developing a new, world-beating product line, the PlayStation game consoles. Ken Kutaragi remains chief executive of Sony Computer Entertainment, but he loses supervision of Sony's consumer electronics and semiconductor business just as it is preparing the Cell Chip, a superchip that is to run the next generation of game machines and also high-definition televisions. With the hand-held PlayStation Portable selling like hotcakes since it was released here in December, the next PlayStation is to come out next year, in time to compete with a new Xbox console by the Microsoft Corporation and a new console by Nintendo.
"I meet many Sony employees here who are so gloomy," Takeshi Oyabu, an assistant professor of Keio Business School, said in an interview here. "Without me saying anything, they say things like 'I am from Sony whose reputation is very bad.' "
