Thread: Sony's New CEO Sees a Tough Road Ahead

Sony's New CEO Sees a Tough Road Ahead

Kazuo Hirai, who takes over as President and CEO of Sony Corp. in April, believes the company needs to set aside previous tradition and focus on the new "user experience" in order to succeed.

As reported earlier this week, Sony's current Executive Deputy President and Chairman of its Computer Entertainment (SCE) arm, 51-year-old Kazuo Hirai, will serve as President and CEO of Sony Corporation starting April 1. He now admits that taking the reigns of Sony is a much tougher, bigger challenge than when he took the reigns of SCE back in 2006.

"I thought turning around the PlayStation business was going to be the toughest challenge of my career, but I guess not," he told the Wall Street Journal in an interview. "It's one issue after another. I feel like 'Holy s—, now what?'"

He said the company will be in serious trouble if it doesn't make adjustments, if it doesn't set aside past successes in manufacturing and focus on the user experience itself. That means shaking up the corporate structure which he blames as the reason behind the lack of product innovation and for keeping with prior tradition. That also means cutting costs like he did with the PlayStation business four years after Sony reported a horrid multi-billion loss.

"Sony cannot continue walking on the same path,” Hirai said on Thursday. "Sony needs to find new business areas, such as medical. We also need to select and narrow our business portfolio." He added that the key questions for hardware in production at Sony should be "What can you do with the product? What are your services? What kind of content do you have?"

"It’s not just about the hardware product, it’s about the user experience," he said.

Hirai joined the company back in 1984 by signing on with Sony Music. In 1995, he was assigned to run SCE America (or SCEA) where he played a vital role in the original PlayStation console's success. Then in 2006 he replaced Ken Kutaragi as SCE President with orders to restore profits after Kutaragi revealed that the PlayStation 3 would lose more than $2 billion in its first year.

One of the changes Hirai plans to make will be the way Sony itself develops products. Previously different business groups mapped out products independently -- a method Hirai said lead to a bloated and disjointed portfolio. "We're going to tell you what you are going to make—not the other way around," Hirai said. "This is a complete sea change."

On Thursday Sony said it expects to make a loss of $2.9 billion in the year ending March 31. That's more than double its previous estimate. Yet Sony shares rose as much as 8.9-percent in Tokyo trading, the biggest daily gain since 2009.

Source

oh god, they are even becoming a dictatorship with their own company

He sees the road but why are walking on it.....

I know a good way to turn things around, Lets remove psp compatibility from vita fully, and you know what remove ps1 support from new ps3's too, Because removing Ps2 compatibility was definetly the best thing you have done on ps3, who needs those crappy jrpgs anyway when we have such awsome, realistic and groundbreaking game series like Call Of Duty. I don't know why, but there is a different taste in every COD game.

PS: This is the definition of "Sarcasm" for a gamer.

^
lolz
+rep

sometimes u have to wonder if sony has a suggestion box of bad ideas. no one with any sense would make the choices that company has made over the past seven years.

Well, they actually do have a suggestion box, so far they have considered many, and 86 of 5000+ ideas in action, of course cross-game chat and full backwards compatibility (the two suggestions with the most positive votes), are not in action. They don't think about their customers, they just take the ideas they can milk more money. They don't care about how much people want something.

This is pretty much the reason they lose. But Sony isn't the only one who makes mistakes, many other console users are pissed to nintendo for not releasing Japanese titles in West, or X360 for not having good exclusives or working on Kinect rather than good games.