Quote:
Originally Posted by FlameOn
The product quality and industrial design was never the issue, they continued making reliable products that looked very good. Issue was they became too premium, too big and too unfocused for a decade making it incredibly hard for them to adapt to changes. They remained focused on making great hardware when other companies were moving to better software and better content, better analytics to achieve results.
From a hardware manufacturer standpoint, other companies continued to improve their production quality while Sony rested on their laurels. Chinese manufacturers severely undercut Sony's profit margins as more and more people adopted their production processes. Other companies were offering similar quality products soon at a lower cost.
Sony's business decision making was inflexible, arrogant and disastrous for nearly a decade ending in the late 2000s. They did not accept the reality that after years of telling the consumer what the consumer wanted, things like propriety designs that made Sony loads of profits, more standards based alternatives that were better designed and cheaper were taking consumer hold. While they still had very cutting edge and innovated industrial design, some of the core ideas built into their products were either off market or they were never given enough attention by business.
Things have changed though, Sony is adapting by shedding it's years and years of bureaucracy. Products are now leaps and bounds more consumer friendly with better polished than they were before. Just look, their cameras use SD cards again! They listened to the consumer building the PS4 and it's a commercial hit winning back a lot of their market share. Their phones, the z/z1 are critically acclaimed and are starting to reverse the huge drops in market share they experienced due to iPhone. AND they've made price reductions to make them competitive again. Question now is where Sony has changed fast enough and whether they have enough cash reserves to make it through the reorganization and streamlining to become an overall successful company again. The gaming division isn't a problem right now since it's been quite profitable, the mobile division is starting to see profits again (it's first in five years). Can other divisions can make the same turnarounds or will they be shed like Sony's PC business? Who knows... but the gaming division will be healthy for at least this generation (5-8 years)
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I read an interesting article on how Sony lost the TV market. In the old CRT days Sony was well known for producing some of the best consumer TV's and in those days they controlled the electronic hardware that made up the CRT and if anyone remembers those TV's were big and heavy because they were made of a lot of parts. Now all you need to make an LCD TV is a microprocessor and generic LCD display making it very simple for other companies to make a quality TV for cheap undercutting the Japanese giants like Sony, Panasonic, etc. Samsung for instance was in the early 90's known as a cheap Korean brand but they forged forward trying to grow and improve and the advent of LCD's made it easier for them to go head to head making equivalent LCD TV's for Sony while being able to charge less and eventually surpassed Sony.