(via One Thing Well.)

The article is terrible and I have no idea why anyone has linked to it (and, frankly, why Businessweek published it). It does little more than briefly summarise the situation at Sony over the past decade. Critical analysis is kept to the bare minimum. This despite the fact that it’s over 3,000 words. Where do all those words go? Partly into laying out Sony’s problems (or, to be more accurate, the problems identified by the apparently sole source for the story: Howard Stringer) and partly into just talking about Howard Stringer and his background. Don’t know who he is and can’t be bothered reading his Wikipedia entry? Don’t worry because the boffins at Businessweek have you covered. Want actual analysis? Well, shit.

As I was reading it, two things gave me pause to wonder how well the story had been researched. At one point, the authors Bryan Gruley and Cliff Edwards (as difficult as it is to believe, this piece of reporting required the efforts of two people!) point out that relations between the hardware engineers at Sony in Japan and the content guys in the U.S. were so strained at one point that Sony’s U.S. movie studio had difficulty getting Sony products for use in its movies. It contrasts this with the ease with which Samsung could put its phones in blockbusters like The Matrix.

By Samsung I guess they meant Nokia. Which, you know, is an easy mistake to make: one being a South Korean electronic behemoth and the other being a Nordic mobile phone manufacturer. I for one am constantly confusing Koreans and Finns (the ears are how you tell them apart).

Later in the article, Stringer uses the phrase ‘Lehman shock’ to refer to the global financial crisis that began with the failure of the investment bank Lehman Brothers. The article says that this is Stringer’s ‘shorthand’ for the GFC. This should be setting off warning bells. Have the writers of this piece done any research about Japan? ‘Lehman shock’ is not Stringer’s shorthand; it is the way that Japan refers to the global financial crisis. Shouldn’t you have, like, asked someone what this term meant if you hadn’t heard before? Maybe it would have cropped up in all the background interviews you did with Japanese people?

It’s then that it hits you that there is a remarkable absence of any reporting involving Japan.¹ Sure, Sony’s a global company, Stringer himself is Welsh-born (which the article duly notes) and Kazuo Hirai (the article suggests he is likely to succeed Stringer) divides his time between the United States and Japan but Sony is still a quintessentially Japanese company. What do its problems about combining hardware with software say about Japan’s problems combining hardware and software? What do its problems about embracing the Internet as a delivery platform say about Japan’s problems embracing the Internet as a delivery platform? What do its problems about adapting to change, particularly that brought by a foreign CEO say about Japan’s problems adapting to change, particularly that brought by a foreign CEO? I don’t know because these questions are never even asked, let alone answered.

Sony is a company of engineers, we’re told, and that’s the reason software sucks. Memo to Businessweek: Google? Chock full of engineers. Microsoft? Ditto. Apple? It’s engineers all the way down (to Jony Ive).

Now granted they’re a different type of engineer and maybe what you meant were hardware engineers. Maybe this says something about the problem besetting Sony. (Ooh, an avenue for inquiry!) Any reason to believe that’s changed? All these new whizz-bang products from Sony like tablets and phones and laptops, I guess they’re all going to be running same great new Sony software now that Stringer’s reoriented the ship? Oh, what? They’re running Windows and Android? Software written by someone else? That Sony has no relationship with? Did you ask Stringer (or indeed any Sony executive) about whether they consider the outsourcing of their software to third parties an issue? That it prevents them from adding anything unique to their products that might differentiate them from cheaper ones from Samsung and other manufacturers? Oh. No, I guess not. I guess you were too busy admiring the Central Park reservoir.

There is a great article to be written about Sony. This is not it.

On the changes to the keyboard on the most recent Sony Vaio laptops:

The computer keyboard isn’t a place where radical UI design changes are desirable. To extend the marketing metaphor, it’s like the typeface of a book. You’re stuck with the same old alphabet, in the same configuration, and your job is to preserve its usefulness while investing the work with with a certain character. The smart choice is to design something good and stick with it.

But Sony does not. The changes to the chiclet keys in the Vaio Z, however slight, show that it can’t even refine its own winning ideas. It’s as if Sony was using Helvetica before almost everyone else, then switched to Arial when the world followed suit.

Speaking of Dedieu, I’ve just finished reading The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M Christensen. I want to write a fuller post on this in the coming days but it’s difficult not to see Nintendo as almost the prototypical example of Christensen’s disruption theory. A number of quarters of excellent profits with the world praising management before all of a sudden they dive off the edge of a cliff.

Growing up as a gadget nerd in the 1990s, there was no brand as exciting as Sony. Yes, Apple made great computers, and that’s what we used. But almost everything else, I wanted from Sony.

I wasn’t even an Apple nerd in the 90s, so for me it was all Sony, all the way. The mighty have indeed fallen.

Unfortunately, they’ve also listened to the guy who’s the top hit on these results. Prior to today, if you hit the down arrow on a search results page you would activate a caret on the first search result. As you pressed up and down, you could move the caret to different results. If you hit enter, the website of the result would open.

No more! Now hitting up and down do nothing, leaving you trapped within the search box. The only way to get out is to hit the Tab key. Not that big a deal? I guess, but the whole point of Google Instant was to save you unnecessary key strokes. They just added one back in.

There is no substitute for hard work and no short cuts to success. You want to build a business? Great. Be prepared to put the time into it. Don’t believe someone who says that, for $100, they’ll show you how to do it in 48 hours.

I can see the value of something like this for showing to very close family but I just don’t understand why you want to want to show this to a friend or acquaintance.

Time will tell if I’m right or just getting old.