Quote:
Originally Posted by spellbanisher
I don't know really what happened with monitors and televisions, other than that two decades of deflationary conditions have made it difficult for Japanese manufacturers to compete with Korean manufacturers.
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The Sony Story on TVs is well known: they misread the switch to digital TV.
Much as the other markets, they believed they knew better than everybody else.
While all their competitors realized that digital HDTV would need digital displays, Sony stayed with CRTs which, after all, worked beautifully for Japan's *analog* HDTV. Once it became clear that the market likes *big* HDTVs--bigger than CRT tech can deliver--Sony proceeded to bet on everything *except* what the market ended up choosing.They bet on plasma, they bet on LCD rear projection, they bet on LCOS rear projection and made a class-action lawsuit of a mess.
By the time they realized they needed large LCD panels *fast* the only way they could get them was either OEMing them or a coop venture. So they paid for half of Samsung's new factory for half the factory's output. After a couple years of trying to charge more than Samsung for same size TVs they found themselves unable to absorb their share of the plant's output and, bleeding red ink all over, they sold the plant to Samsung--at a discount, no less.
(All along, they produced amazing OLED tech demos and limited-run, ultrapriced large LCDs that sold by the hundreds.)
BTW, on gaming consoles, SONY has *almost* caught up to XBOX in lifetime sales...on the strength of a *massive* lead in the Japanese market. Outside japan, Sony has managed a distant third. And any day now, the PS3 will finally break even in lifecycle revenue. How that came to pass is a long, sordid story that could not have happened in any other company. Not even Olympus.