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How did Sony fall behind?
Akio Morita once gave Jobs a walkman, and he was fascinated, repeatedly disassembling and studying the production process. Later, the iMac came out, and Jobs planned to name it Manman to pay tribute to Sony Walkman. But today, Sony has almost no presence in the field of consumer electronics, and its market value is one-fifth of that of Samsung and 5% of that of Apple. How did Sony fall behind?

1946, 38-year-old Masaru Ibuka founded Sony's predecessor "Tokyo Communication Industry". He said to the employees, "If we do the same things as big companies, we have no chance to win. But there is no end to technology, and we have to do things that big companies can't do. " "Technology-oriented" and "different" were Sony's two magic weapons at that time.

1947, Bell Laboratories first invented the transistor. Akio Morita collected a lot of data from the United States, and gave the "transistor technology" of Bell Labs to his brother-in-law, Kazuo Iwasaki, to study it well. Three months later, a 44-page report between rocks was released. 1955, the first TR-55 transistor radio in Japan came out, only 1 month later than the first transistor radio in the world.

1958 65438+ 10, 4,000 Sony radios were stolen in American warehouses. Gensonnie became an instant hit in the United States when thieves took Sony radios regardless of other companies. Later, Sony invented the first transistor TV, the first picture tube color TV, the first portable video recorder and the most famous walkman player.

Similar to Huawei, DJI and other China enterprises, Sony benefited from the vigorous development of the local industrial chain from the beginning, and quickly established the world's leading product research and development capability and industry position with the "engineer bonus" with sufficient education population. 1959, Japanese transistor sales ranked first in the world. 1968, the Japanese government promoted Hitachi, Fujitsu and NEC to develop high-performance computers. 198 1 year, the export defect rate of many Japanese semiconductor companies to the United States is zero, and the market share of DRAM is 80%.

From then on, people in China became familiar with the play. From 65438 to 0985, the trade deficit between the United States and Japan was $49.7 billion, accounting for 1/3 of the US trade deficit. The United States rebukes Japanese companies for being protected by the government, which is not fair market competition. Similar to today, the United States took out the 30 1 clause, demanding that Japan increase the share of American enterprises to 20%, reverse the trade deficit, and let the yen appreciate by 20%, otherwise heavy taxes will be imposed. The Japanese compromised and signed the voluntary export restraints Agreement. The semiconductor industry, which was built by the whole country, was divided between South Korea and Taiwan Province Province. With the appreciation of the yen, Japan has also ushered in the "lost twenty years".

Today, some people still think that the high cost of Sony TV is due to the transfer of upstream enterprises, and Sony cannot achieve vertical integration. Stringer's product "full price" strategy is only the only decision Sony can make in the face of industrial layout transfer.

In addition to industrial transfer, the second reason for Sony's backwardness is the decline of "engineer spirit". When Idei Nobuyuki took office, faced with a debt of 5 trillion yen, he could only cut costs through strict performance and financial evaluation. This has led to the transfer of enterprise discourse power from engineers to managers, and the tolerance for trial and error has disappeared. The manager didn't win the trust of the engineers. When an engineer left his job, he told the media: "The Sony founded by Akio Morita and Ibrahimovic is gone, and the passion and dreams when starting a business are no longer felt."

In this regard, Idei Nobuyuki understood it thoroughly: "If it is the founder, just put forward' this is my decision' and employees will be willing to accept it. But for professional managers, they can only increase the total amount of business and interests, show the results of their own operations through numbers, and then unite the internal centripetal force ... "

Over the years, the management methods of technology companies have been constantly evolving. For example, Silicon Valley advocates OKR management, Huawei establishes a rotating chairman system, and Ali proposes a partner system, even at the expense of self-discipline and repeated structural adjustments to stimulate the vitality of enterprises. On the contrary, Sony, which has exhausted its entrepreneurial spirit and only talked about KPI, has already lost the motivation of self-innovation and fallen into the "curse of success".

2065438+March 2009, Kenichiro Yoshida, who will take over as president, secretly visited Shenzhen to learn from Ren. In that conversation, Ren particularly emphasized organizational vitality: the top-level strategic decision-making should allow a few new employees to participate; Lower-level employees should also occupy a certain proportion in the lower-level campaign decisions. "He attended the meeting, even if he didn't understand it, his brain opened and he understood the future battle in advance."

The third contradiction that dragged Sony down is the internal estrangement that is hard to return. In order to adapt to transnational operation, Idei Nobuyuki has implemented performance appraisal and subsidiary independence system, but it has established an independent kingdom. Based on the narrow consideration of the interests of departments or subsidiaries, Sony missed one consumption trend after another.

Sony hired Tim Schaaff, Apple's vice president in charge of research and development of products such as QuickTime, to take charge of PSN business, which involves many subsidiaries such as movies, games, music and software. Every step forward needs to be reviewed by various departments, and the progress is slow. Today, Netflix has nearly 65.438+0.5 billion subscribers in the world, but there are still more than 90 million PSN users who can't smoothly see exclusive content such as Spider-Man and 007 on PS4.

Adam Marsh, senior manager of Sony's global marketing, once revealed: "The imaging department refused to hand over the camera technology to the mobile phone department because it was worried that the mobile phone and the micro-single would have the same camera experience." Now, people clearly realize what kind of killer product Huawei mobile phone with Leica lens technology is. In the view of some Sony departments, the functions of micro-single and smart phone overlap seriously. If the mobile phone can adjust the photo effect not inferior to the micro-single, it will affect its sales.

2065438+In March 2009, Sony announced that it would combine the irreparable mobile communication business (MC) with the image product business (IP & amp; S), home entertainment and audio services (He&; S) Incorporate into electronic products and solutions business (EP & amp; S), this is probably the last legacy of Kazuo Hirai.

The general retirement age of Sony management is 65. Kazuo Hirai, who is only 59 years old this year, chose to step down at this time, which seems to mean some kind of compromise and letting go. From stringer to Kazuo Hirai, it is their duty to "unify Sony". This year's CES, successor Kenichiro Yoshida repositioned Sony as a "creative entertainment company", which is actually a continuation of the idea since Stringer, hoping to realize the organic unity of software and hardware inside and outside the company through content.

The story of Kazuo Hirai is here for the time being, and the thinking about how Sony can get out of mediocrity is not over yet.