Sony founder Akio Morita dreamed of lifting Japan from the ashes of WWII by selling the best consumer electronics in the world, and he made it happen. By 1985, when he filmed this American Express commercial, he was legend all over the world.
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Akio Morita envisioned Sony as a way to lift Japan from the rubble of two atom bombs to world business dominance, and he pulled off the unlikely feat. Morita was as important to his company as Steve Jobs was to Apple, but Sony has not been a player in the Internet Age. An excerpt from Bryan Gruley’s smart Businessweek article on the topic:
“There’s more to Sony’s problems than acts of God and currency traders. The maker of the Walkman and the Trinitron hasn’t driven pop culture for years. Sony thrived in an era of stand-alone electronics. When the Internet arose and digital began to mean connected, iPods became the center of people’s entertainment lives, then smartphones and tablets—which Sony was late to produce. Even the quintessential Sony product—the TV set—has become a millstone. Sony has lost nearly $8.5 billion on TVs over eight years and expects to keep losing at least into 2013. Samsung, Vizio, and other upstarts have driven prices so low that one Sony executive says the company charges less for some TVs than it cost to ship them a few years ago.
Sony has been trying to adapt to the Internet Age for at least a decade, yet remains a gargantuan and unwieldy manufacturer, with 168,200 employees, 41 factories, and more than 2,000 products from headphones to medical printers to Hollywood-grade 3D movie production equipment. Jeff Loff, a senior analyst with Macquarie Capital Securities in Tokyo, points out that Sony sells nine different 46-inch TV models in the U.S. and its mobile-phone joint venture with Ericsson offers more than 40 handsets. ‘Can you imagine how dilutive that is to your R&D?’ he says. A Sony spokesman says the number of phones is being reduced, and notes that Samsung has 15 different 46-inch TVs.
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Ted Koppel interviews Akio Morita about Japan’s tech dominance, in 1990, just a few years before Sony was to be eclipsed by U.S. companies:
Tags: Akio Morita, Bryan Gruley
Legendary Sony founder Akio Morita was reputedly the tech titan that Steve Jobs studied most closely. In the 1950s, Morita opened a start-up in the basement of a bombed-out department store and created the world’s first transistor radio. He was more responsible than anyone for Japan emerging as a world leader in consumer electronics. In 1980, he visited Tom Snyder to unveil a line of new products.
From “Akio Morita: Guru of Gadgets,” Kenichi Ohmae’s 1998 Time article about the late-life Morita: “Almost exactly five years ago, Akio Morita–Mr. Sony–fell to the ground during a game of tennis. The co-founder and chairman of the board had suffered a stroke. He has since been in a wheelchair. This is particularly sad, as Morita had never been able to sit still and relax. At 72, he was playing tennis at 7 a.m. each Tuesday. I know this well because I would practice on the court next to him. My tennis, however, was very different from his. I played with an instructor, and if I was tired, I would just take a break. Not him. He challenged everybody, including young athletes.
This was in keeping with a man who created one of the first global corporations. He saw long before his contemporaries that a shrinking world could present enormous opportunities for a company that could think beyond its own borders, both physically and psychologically. And he pursued that strategy with his relentless brand of energy in every market, particularly the U.S. It is notable that this year, according to a Harris survey, Sony is rated the No. 1 brand name by American consumers, ahead of Coca-Cola and General Electric.”
Tags: Akio Morita, Kenichi Ohmae, Tom Snyder