Coca-Cola on 22 January 2009
| NJ5 said: A few comments on some cherry-picked parts: The dispute centres on whether products such as televisions have become commodities, in which case, Sir Howard believes, Sony should cut its production costs and rely more on sales of software built into its gadgets. He emphasised the importance of this business in a speech at the US Consumer Electronics Show this month. Other than gaming hardware, what other of Sony's "gadgets" can be a platform for these software sales? I can think of mobile phones and not much else. Am I forgetting something obvious? There is acute sensitivity, too, about sacking Japanese staff, who believe that they have a “job for life”. However, a decision to spare them from the planned cuts would risk angering Sony’s foreign employees. A manager at Sony in the US said his colleagues saw “a lot of fat” in the Japanese operations. I can perfectly understand the need to cut Japanese operations, especially as those are the most expensive right now due to exchange rates. Unfortunately for them that's the most sensitive region to cut jobs at, one more challenge for any restructuring they attempt to implement. “We used to get the message: ‘Make a high quality product’. Now we don’t know what we should be doing, except maybe not spending any money,” said one engineer who has left the company. Perhaps Sony should focus on more than high-quality products. Their dependence on the premium market with little else to fall back on is part of what got them into the mess they're in now. If they want to sell premium products and nothing else, they should at least be prepared for a severe fall in demand, and obviously they were not.
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I was just at San Jose, and a friend there told me that the Japanese workers are getting laid off as well, but being rehired to different division. It is just a heresay, but at least one person i know is pissed.
