At the beginning of this generation sony's concentrated efforts were focused on BluRay. At that point they still thought of themselves as a hardware company. One could argue that had this effort been positioned towards software and services, the yields would be better.
Blu-ray is a platform business for them, not just hardware. They also offer services to the industry, and follow up with 3D Blu-ray and 3DTV. I agree they should have followed up with more interesting Blu-ray stack.
Good points all around which is why I continue to ask, is Stringer the right guy to oversee integrating all these different systems and devices into a unified corporate vision? He has been at the helm almost 6 years and I personally don't think enough is happening quickly enough.
What's the "right" guy ? I don't think it makes sense to think only one guy is responsible for changing the Sony group. If you only look at systems and devices, then you're missing the content arms, chemicals, financial services, etc. IMHO, his most important job is to provide a stable environment and air cover for his team to run. It's a different yardstick here. Look at Steve Ballmer. His team runs fast, but his investors still want to get rid of him. ^_^
From a systems and devices point of view, you should be looking at Kaz Hirai and Hiroshi Yoshioka. I would lump content services into Kaz's offerings too since he's in charge of the delivery platform.
Specifically for consumer services...
Kaz has just become the head of all the consumer divisions recently. Japan faces unprecedented challenges. I doubt the analysts will penalize Kaz at this extraordinary times. But all excuses aside...
During the transition, Move was badly communicated. I would chalk it up to Kaz's failure in the mean time (Since his marketing heads left).
I can tell Kaz is not technical (and Tretton too !). Both of them have to find a lot of words (Buzzwords !) to convey a user experience. They may need to overcome this challenge with additional assistance. Operationally, i's difficult to put buzzwords into tangible action items. It's also impossible for the end user to experience/enjoy a buzzword. So they often come across as "useless" or "ineffective" to a customer like me during communication.
As for innovation and unification of devices, his attention is clearly on PSN services thus far (and "standardized" Playstation Suite devices). It's a good consolidation point, but it's also a defensive and time consuming move to complete the whole picture.
For short term focus, we will have to zero in on their next line of consumer products (NGP, S1, S2 and Vaio). e.g., How well the user experience performs, and the attractiveness of the ecosystem. He may have to accelerate part of the PSN plan to at least differentiate the appeal of the ecosystem.
I don't think we have enough info to conclude either way yet.
Sony seems awful in general about focus. They have had the eyetoy and such for years but couldn't get a vision of it to push to consumers like connect. Now they have had remoteplay but it just languished only used on old games and some launch titles. Now it seems nintendo may make that their push next gen. They have all these great ideas hardware wise but seem unable to push anything cohesive software side.
Yeah... they don't stick to the vision long enough to realize the fruit. I wonder if RemotePlay will make a come back in NGP/PS3.
