let me preface this post by agreeing with many of you in that he does still have a lot to prove. At the same time, he's already shown us quite a bit so I'm just trying to give credit where I think credit is due.
RolStoppable said:
He stopped the bleeding by cutting the limbs off. |
This isn't really a fitting analogy. Limbs are designed to support, not hold you back. In this case I think it'd fit better to say that Sonys hitting the gym, they're losing all that water weight, leaning out and preparing to be more agile. Later on they can bulk up by adding back or incorporating new divisions designed to make them profit. As it stands, everything that's been cut has been waste that was -not- helping to support them a la limbs.
| greenmedic88 said: Sony can be described as a conglomerate with too many anchors holding the ship back, and not enough engines driving the company forward. They have been dropping a lot of their loss leading divisions like their Vaio PC division, their Ericsson mobile division, their HDTV division, etc. and dumping non beneficial assets/liabilities, but it's very hard for a company of Sony's size to adjust fire rapidly as we've seen since 2008. It seems unlikely that Sony can rebuild its image off the back of essentially one device, but it appears that they have been more or less been doing just that with the PS4. Naturally, Sony has always had its media/entertainment divisions as well as their lesser known financial services, but the main success story has been the PS4, which Sony has been wise to build off of with all the related services tied to the console. It's still too early to say really, but it is pretty safe to say that SCE will continue to do well moving forward, whether as a separate division (I don't see this happening as the Playstation brand is a halo brand for Sony) or as the most visible, profitable division driving growth (or reducing overall losses) for Sony. |
Great post. I agree with your main points.
| Soundwave said: I see plenty of iPads, iPhones (obviously), and even Macbooks all the time and I travel constantly for work. Sony electronics? Lol. Good luck with that. One thing I will say about Sony's electronics at least from the 90s is they're built to last. I have an old ass RPTV from 1999 from Sony that still works today and a camcorder that's 20+ years old that still works from Sony. But from I've heard the build quality of their more modern electronics went to sh*t a long time ago. |
Sony products as a brand have always been reliable and built to last, at least in our household. We still have our Sony DVD Player from the early 2000s, my PS1 broke a few months back because I was doing this disc swapping trick to force burned games to load, my PS2 broke because of disc swapping custom guitar hero games lol, my PS3 never broke, etc. The only thing I can really point to would be the first batch of joysticks on the DS4 but that's been remedied and it's a peripheral, not a major piece of hardware. The quality of their products has always been outstanding and durable, something that I'll maintain until proven otherwise.
| WhiteEaglePL said: Doubt its enough to turn the maesltrom around in the long term beacuse most of that new news is PS. |
The thing is we're seeing them transfer from a major hardware company to a major entertainment/software company. Many things point to a cloud based future and in that respect they're very well poised to be at the forefront so when we see things like PS Vue or the Spotify partnership, it makes total sense that these things fall under the "Playstation Network" which now spans the entire company as opposed to a few products. I guess from Vue alone, their net worth can double from $23 Billion USD to $46 billion USD. From a single service. There's MAJOR money to be made in entertainment and it's a highly profitable venture.
| KBG29 said: I am very pleased with Kaz so far. Rolling all of Sony's digital content under Playstation Network was the first major step in setting the foundation for a successful future. Playstation Vue is set top be worth just as much, if not more than the whole company with a market of over 160M cable subscribers. This is a move that should put more Playstations in American homes than in any previous generation, and it will mean a much more active user base. Kaz is moving Playstation image further away from the Kiddy Video Game console, to the Ultimate Smart Box for the TV. The next thing he needs to do is merge Sony Mobile Communications into Sony Computer Entertainment. Building a Playstation Phone bringing all of the Xperia Apps to Playstation mobile, and re-branding the Xperia line products under the new Playstation Mobile OS will give them the edge they need to truly bloom in the mobile arena. With this they would have a solid hold on both Home and Mobile entertainment and daily use devices. Beyond this, I think the rest of Sony looks great. Bravia is starting to finally climb out of its hole. Sony Music, and Sony Pictures have never really had any issues profitability wise. Sony's Camera division is on its way to being the defacto camera with basically every device on the market, and the financial division is just a cash cow. Rebuilding Sony behind Playstation 4 and Playstation Phone, Kaz will go down in history as a visionary like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. The journey has just begun, and damn is it going to be a good ride. |
It does seem like they're preparing to go for the throat of Americans in that sense, doesn't it? It's going to come down to marketing the PS4 in a way that makes the average adult want to ditch their cable subscription. Certainly exciting to see if this tactic works. The one thing I've seen a few people talk about that never really made sense to me though, was combining Vita with a phone. I don't think that's a good idea unless there was just a peripheral that plugged into a standard candy bar shaped phone that added the physical buttons. I wouldn't even associate the word Playstation with it though because the best selling phones market based on that 'cool' factor and a lot of the 'cool' kids wouldn't want to be associated with video gaming. Not to be rude lol but most of my friends wouldn't touch a phone like that. It needs to be edgy, cool, hip, sexy. Not a portable console
