Where this article bothers me is that the author only echoes fairly common complaints about Sony.
Back in the day, when Sony's Trinitron and Walkman were king, there was a (relatively) small priemium to buy Sony products (in the range of 5% to 10%) which was easily worth the noticeable increase in quality. With the introduction of low-cost Chineese manufactured electronics, most name-brand manufacturers have increased their quality and lowered their price in order to compete and Sony is not an exception to this. Where the problem arrives with Sony now is that the low-end Chineese manufactured product has a similar quality difference to the top of the line Sony product as old top of the line name brand electronics had with a similar Sony product but the price difference has gone from being fairly small (5%) to massive (50% to 100% higher).
To put it another way, the entire market has changed drastically over the past 15 to 20 years and Sony's business strategy hasn't changed that much over the same period of time. Over the short term Sony just has to weather the storm, but in the medium to long term they will need to reconsider how the business is run in order to thrive.
