I’m reading the New Yorker article on Howard Stringer’s struggles with Sony that David Card and Michael Gartenberg have already recommended.
The author seems to bought the proposition that poor communication between the silos is what is strangling Sony. I’m wondering if the opposite is true. It looks to me like the pursuit of false synergies may be at least as big a problem.
Did Sony’s ability to put its film assets behind Blu-ray encourage them to get into a format war they’re likely to lose? Did Sony’s ownership of vast reservoirs of music encourage them to launch their less-than-successful SACD high-definition audio disc? Did it commit them to a DRM strategy that not only knocked them out of the portable music player market, but convinced them to pursue a their disastrous rootkit project? Has Sony’s commitment to its proprietary Memory Stick format made its cameras, computers and MP3 players a little bit less attractive? Will Sony’s strategy of developing its own super-microprocessor for Playstation lock it into a unwinnable long-term competition with Intel, compel it to put its own expensive chips into commodity products where they don’t belong, and turn it into the Silicon Graphics of consumer electronics?
If Sony had not been able to marshall these corporate resources to support doomed platforms, would they have been forced to engage the kind of give-and-take with their customers and suppliers that makes free markets work?
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.