Quote:
Originally Posted by Anabana
IBM managed an amazing come-back considering their stock prices.
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Indeed.
The way they did it was to reinvent themselves as a Technology Services company instead of a Computer company.
IBM has done that no less than three times now; they started out as a punchcard/tabulating machine company, became an office equipment company, then a computer company, and are now primarily an IT services provider. Smart managers transform their companies just *before* they hit a crisis.
Sony started out as a consumer electronics company and added all sorts of subsidiaries (chemicals, semiconductors, media, content, etc) but they still think and act like a hardware manufacturer at heart. And they still think "features!" instead of "value!".
Specsheet engineering just doesn't get you too far these days. Especially if the customers don't see the value in the features you choose to focus on. That is Sony's problem in gaming, in ebook readers, and *especially* TVs. It isn't that they don't put in enough features, but rather that the features they focus on don't matter to consumers.
Sony TVs simply don't have anything to sell them except the brand and their (now-tarnished) past reputation. There is a reason that a lot of the financial types think they need to stop wasting money on TVs and get out. Because the boom of HDTV adoption in North America is just about over. Easy sales are over. If Sony couldn't make money when sales were easy...
IBM knew they had to evolve to survive and that evolution meant getting out of Keyboards and printers (Lexmark) and selling off the commodity PC business (to Lenovo) so they could transform themselves into a new healthy company.
Sony needs to do the same; figure out what they want to be next and become it. Fast. Their resources are vast but not infinite. And their annual losses, they are big, big, big...