Interview of Howard Stringe (CEO of SONY)

[dallas]

When you took the helm, Sony consisted of a bundle of stubborn corporate divisions practised in resisting each other's advances. Is that a thing of the past?

Stringer: Not entirely, but the company has changed enormously. I adopted Sony United as the name of the mission, and everyone who works for us understands it now. Some pockets of resistance remain, however, in some areas.

What are the sticking points?

Stringer: I set the target, to be achieved by March 2011, of a product portfolio in which 90 percent of the devices will be capable of networking and connecting wirelessly. It's a tall order. Our engineers have to work across all our divisions in order to develop standards. This includes the consumer electronics division as well as the film and music production units. The younger employees don't have any problem with this approach, but as in any large company there are pockets of resistance. My rallying cry at the last management meeting was ‘Get mad, get mad when someone beats you!

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A lot has been written in Fortune and Forbes about how Sony's divisions want to basically compete against each other rather than working together. I like Stringer's approach of making the divisions work together and we're seeing it w/ the PS3: movie downloads (many will be from Sony pictures), Home's movie theatre, Home's streaming music, music video downloads in 2009 (Sony's music division) and from other interviews Stringer wants his HDTVs to have a little device attached that will enable customers with internet to download movies from Sony and skip the pay per view stuff altogether. It would make since, b/c Sony is also a movie company and therefore could get a fat profit margin off of the project.

With respect to the Ericsson, I dunno. Perhaps Sony can slowly buy out the partner. Also, the prices for the cellphones should be going down, as some new OLED displays which will be less power hungry, cheaper, and thinner thus more attractive, will make for more purchases of phones albeit for all manufacturers not just Sony's phones.