To be fair they have a lot of new tech coming out this next  9 months.

Lots of new phones, lots of new tablets and lots of new hybrid laptops.

Thye have to be succesful with them.

So what about all of the investments that Sony have been in recently?  Buying Gaikei, investing in some sort of tech that'll be used for the medical field.....aren't those supposed to be helping?  Or will the benefit of Sony's investments take more time to see the fruits of their labor?

This is absolutely true. While the PS4 will be a big part product and they're counting on it to be successful, it isn't by any means the last gamble Sony has.

This has nothing to do with "Selling off assets they don't need". Obviously those employees need some place to work. Here is the whole problem explained for those who don't get it. Sony, like many other japanese TV makers, has too many plants and overproduces TVs that are too expensive. They also have a building full of employees that are part of the TV selling business group. Now in America, the solution is always the same : Fire the employees and shut down the plants as needed, within 15 minute's notices. In Japan, it is completely impossible to fire people (technically you can, but you have to pay their salaries until retirement. This has lead to an institution called "window jobs"). Combine that with a foreigner as ceo (Stringer, whose underlings seem to have apparently worked against him as rumours are fircling around),  Sony has, in the past years, fired every person and plant they could _outside_ of Japan (the console group in my country is history in a few weeks from now, so this is still going on). At this point, Sony is pretty much stripped bare outside of Japan. Enter Kaz Hirai, the Uebermensch as some think here he is, and guess what - not even Kaz has any solutions to the fundamental problem. There is no Kaz Superplan. I'm with Kowenicki this time (rare occasion I should add), Hirai is just buying time for himself by selling the table silver, and hoping that the problem slowly goes away over the next years while burning through the money for the two buildings (5000 employees means about 150-250 employees less per year through retirement and other causes). In the end, I see for the first time a Japanese company gutting Japanese plants and firing Japanese employees wholesale, because Sony does not have enough table silver to hunger through the losses (mainly from the TV business).

Wow, that was a very informative post.

Two questions:

Do you know specifically that those 5000 people working in the Tokyo building that was just sold are working with Sony's TV business?

Could you tell more about "window jobs" in Japan in general?

There are certainly tons of other jobs than TV business related involved in those 5000 employees mentioned in the news (a few obvious choices are cleaning,house technicians, etc - all those jobs that are now on the new building owner's payroll, hence no longer on Sony's payroll).

As far as "Window jobs" are concerned, this might have changed over the years. In the past, young japanese people, after finishing school/university entered the job carousel by applying at company x. When accepted, this was a lifetime quarantee for a job at that company (some companies even had /have?) their own company graveyards where honorary employees would be buried if they wished so). Firing people meant big trouble with the law. So what did corporations do when an emplyee was no longer needed due to whatever reason? The "window job" was created. Essentially the employee would go to work as usual but was/is assigned to a special workplace where he essentially read newspapers or looked out the window all day. I've seen a few documentaries about that depressing stuff but that was many years ago. Maybe things have changed. Firing somebody (and being fired) has always been connected with "loss of face" (for all involved parties), and this is the worst thing that could happen to any Asian and is to be avoided at all costs (suing someone in court is also something connected to "loss of face", there are way fewer law suits in Asia than in any other parts of the world).