I don't think they obtained all those assets while creating debt. Remember Sony was huge in the 90s. I'm not 100% sure on this, but all I've read on the news is how Sony has been downsizing (slowly but still doing it). I would guess that their assets decreased as their debt increased and not that they both increased together.

I really like the part of about control and proprietary formats. That shit needs to stop.

"“Stringer also encountered a hardware-worshipping culture that mistrusted him because he wasn’t an engineer. He was a ‘content guy’ who supposedly cared less about making devices than pushing movies and music. ‘Whenever I mentioned content,’ [Stringer] says, ‘people would roll their eyes because, ‘This is an electronics company, and content is secondary.” That resulted partly from longtime rivalries between engineers in Japan and generally better-paid movie and music people in California. Sony’s consumer electronics unit sometimes declined to send products for use in Sony movies even as Samsung was generating buzz with placements of its phones in blockbusters like The Matrix.” Earlier in 2007, Stringer told a reporter: “I HAVE said before that without content, most gadgets are just junk.”"

and

"PlayStation 3 is a great example of Sony giving too much creative freedom to its engineers by allowing them to create the Rolls-Royce of game consoles without any watchful supervision over the project to pay attention to the costs of materials. The engineers had very little respect for both Sony’s executives and former President and CEO Howard Stringer. The engineers tried hiding the costs from any non-engineer who would be a threat to their creative vision.
A Wall Street Journal article (via Kotaku.com) gave some more insight: “In developing the PlayStation 3 console, the device’s latest iteration, Mr. Kutaragi went over budget on development costs without informing Mr. Stringer, according to a person familiar with the situation.” The article continues by saying, “Mr. Kutaragi was notorious within the company for his reluctance to communicate with his bosses or other units. In 2005, Mr. Kutaragi hosted an event at a big electronics conference in Las Vegas to celebrate the U.S. launch of the PlayStation Portable handheld game machine — one of the company’s biggest products that year. He didn’t invite executives from Sony’s electronics division, which provided the parts.”"

What a huge lack of respect internaly. No wonder Kutaragi got kicked out.

Boy whatever I say makes you really sour doesn't it? I read the article and yes Ive seen what kind of liabilities they have. In fact the liabilities were mentionned before the assets in the article, yet you quote me something Ive already read, whats your agenda? I was talking about their assets and how they have more than those other companies. Whatever you say, how much you try to spin it will not change that fact.

Read the whole thing. Was a pretty decent read, learnt a lot of stuff I didn't know (particularly about that engineers vs. executives stuff, which made me both pleased and sad at the same time).

Anyway, I had a couple of issues with stuff from the article. The first (and easiest to explain) was "Sony plan on selling the Vita at a loss for 3 years", then linking to a neogaf thread which itself links to an examiner article. Kaz's quote is translated from Japanese and tbh I think it's too ambiguous to be used for any kind of evidence until he re-iterates. I see it as "The Vita project will be profitable in 3 years", meaning all the costs to do with it (R&D, marketing, production, perhaps some very early loss leading) will be recovered in 3 years. Other people (including the author of this article) read it as "Vita will be sold at a loss for 3 years before it becomes profitable". With the way Sony have stubbornly refused to drop Vita's price, I think this is wrong, but without any kind of clarification we're not going to know for sure either way. Which is why I don't think it's a very good point to make.

Also, market cap. No make no mistake - I realise Sony's market cap has bombed since 2000 and is continuing to fall, but part of that is a result of heavily, heavily inflated share prices during early 2000's. Microsoft's cap is less than half of the $618 billion it was in 1999, for example. And just to throw in the other of the big three: Nintendo's market cap peaked at an extremely high $85 billion in 2007 yet is worth $14.8 billion today. I know, I know, it's worse for Sony because they're a much bigger company than Nintendo, but still.

In any case, thanks for linking :P I don't particularly like reading doom articles about Sony but sometimes you have to be realistic and realise things aren't great. I'm still going to be hopeful that Kaz can turn things around, and at the very least that I can get a few more great years of Playstation products.

Do you have any graphs for that? I was looking for one and the best one I found was on this article the one that mentions ROE, ROA and Liabilities.

Now look at the definition of ROA:

“Return on Assets reveals how much profit a company earns for every dollar of its assets. Assets include things like cash in the bank, accounts receivable, property, equipment, inventory and furniture.

So if their profits have gone down drastically (specially recently) and their return on assets goes down only slightly, you can logically conclude that their assets have gone down as well.

He read the article and made a comment about SONY's size in comparison to the other mentioned companies by using assets. That's it. There's nothing wrong with that. You then made a comment implying that he did something wrong or was being clueless. Comments like: 

"Oh dear, you are getting involved in the financials. "
"On its own it means absolutely bugger all"
"Do you want to coment again now you have all the information you need? "

can easily be taken that way. You didn't spin anything, you were just being sort of offensive when there was no reason to be.

They spread themselves too thin and the lack of leadership doomed them. Slowly but surely. Even though, they had major monopoly.

The arrogance (and ignorance) is quite telling.

Yes I was talking about their assets, doesn't matter if it was pointless or not, its not up to you to decide that. You seem very sour, don't do that again.

Seriously some of you really need to stop trying to spin this to something good for Sony beacuse they ARE in trouble