What is your honest opinion on the Sony™ Corporation?
Sony Corporation (ソニー株式会社 Sonī Kabushiki Gaisha?), commonly referred to as Sony /ˈsoʊniː/, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Kōnan Minato, Tokyo, Japan.
Its diversified business includes consumer and professional electronics, gaming, entertainment and financial services.
The company is one of the leading manufacturers of electronic products for the consumer and professional markets. Sony is ranked 116th on the 2015 list of Fortune Global 500.
No games
Sony Corporation is the electronics business unit and the parent company of the Sony Group, which is engaged in business through its four operating segments – electronics (including video games, network services and medical business), motion pictures, music and financial services.These make Sony one of the most comprehensive entertainment companies in the world. Sony's principal business operations include Sony Corporation (Sony Electronics in the U.S.), Sony Pictures Entertainment, Sony Computer Entertainment, Sony Music Entertainment, Sony Mobile Communications (formerly Sony Ericsson) and Sony Financial. Sony is among the Worldwide Top 20 Semiconductor Sales Leaders and as of 2013, the fourth-largest television manufacturer in the world, after Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics and TCL.
The Sony Group (ソニー・グループ Sonī Gurūpu?) is a Japan-based corporate group primarily focused on the Electronics (such as AV/IT products and components), Game (such as the PlayStation), Entertainment (such as motion pictures and music) and Financial Services (such as insurance and banking) sectors. The group consists of Sony Corporation (holding and electronics), Sony Computer Entertainment (games), Sony Pictures Entertainment (motion pictures), Sony Music Entertainment (music), Sony/ATV Music Publishing (music publishing), Sony Financial Holdings (financial services) and others.
The company's current slogan is BE MOVED. Their former slogans were make.believe (2009–2014) and like.no.other (2005–2014).
Sony is a member of the SMFG (Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group) keiretsu, the successor to the Mitsui keiretsu to which it previously belonged.
Sony began in the wake of World War II. In 1946, Masaru Ibuka started an electronics shop in a department store building in Tokyo. The company had $530 in capital and a total of eight employees. In the following year he was joined by his colleague, Akio Morita, and they founded a company called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo (Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation). The company built Japan's first tape recorder, called the Type-G. In 1958 the company changed its name to "Sony".
Haven't bought any Sony related stuff since PSP and I'm pretty happy.
When Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo was looking for a romanized name to use to market themselves, they strongly considered using their initials, TTK. The primary reason they did not is that the railway company Tokyo Kyuko was known as TTK.[11] The company occasionally used the acronym "Totsuko" in Japan, but during his visit to the United States, Morita discovered that Americans had trouble pronouncing that name. Another early name that was tried out for a while was "Tokyo Teletech" until Akio Morita discovered that there was an American company already using Teletech as a brand name.[13]
The name "Sony" was chosen for the brand as a mix of two words. One was the Latin word "Sonus", which is the root of sonic and sound, and the other was "Sonny", a common slang term used in 1950s America to call a boy.[4] In the 1950s Japan "sonny boys", was a loan word into Japanese which connoted smart and presentable young men, which Sony founders Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka considered themselves to be.[4]
The first Sony-branded product, the TR-55 transistor radio, appeared in 1955 but the company name did not change to Sony until January 1958.[14]
At the time of the change, it was extremely unusual for a Japanese company to use Roman letters to spell its name instead of writing it in kanji. The move was not without opposition: TTK's principal bank at the time, Mitsui, had strong feelings about the name. They pushed for a name such as Sony Electronic Industries, or Sony Teletech. Akio Morita was firm, however, as he did not want the company name tied to any particular industry. Eventually, both Ibuka and Mitsui Bank's chairman gave their approval.[11]
According to Schiffer, Sony's TR-63 radio "cracked open the U.S. market and launched the new industry of consumer microelectronics." By the mid-1950s, American teens had begun buying portable transistor radios in huge numbers, helping to propel the fledgling industry from an estimated 100,000 units in 1955 to 5 million units by the end of 1968.
Sony co-founder Akio Morita founded Sony Corporation of America in 1960.[10] In the process, he was struck by the mobility of employees between American companies, which was unheard of in Japan at that time.[10] When he returned to Japan, he encouraged experienced, middle-aged employees of other companies to reevaluate their careers and consider joining Sony.[10] The company filled many positions in this manner, and inspired other Japanese companies to do the same.[10] Moreover, Sony played a major role in the development of Japan as a powerful exporter during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.[15] It also helped to significantly improve American perceptions of "made in Japan" products.[16] Known for its production quality, Sony was able to charge above-market prices for its consumer electronics and resisted lowering prices.[16]
In 1971, Masaru Ibuka handed the position of president over to his co-founder Akio Morita. Sony began a life insurance company in 1979, one of its many peripheral businesses. Amid a global recession in the early 1980s, electronics sales dropped and the company was forced to cut prices.[16] Sony's profits fell sharply. "It's over for Sony," one analyst concluded. "The company's best days are behind it."[16] Around that time, Norio Ohga took up the role of president. He encouraged the development of the Compact Disc in the 1970s and 1980s, and of the PlayStation in the early 1990s. Ohga went on to purchase CBS Records in 1988 and Columbia Pictures in 1989, greatly expanding Sony's media presence. Ohga would succeed Morita as chief executive officer in 1989.
Under the vision of co-founder Akio Morita[17] and his successors, the company had aggressively expanded into new businesses.[15] Part of its motivation for doing so was the pursuit of "convergence," linking film, music and digital electronics via the Internet.[15] This expansion proved unrewarding and unprofitable,[15] threatening Sony's ability to charge a premium on its products[17] as well as its brand name.[17] In 2005, Howard Stringer replaced Nobuyuki Idei as chief executive officer, marking the first time that a foreigner had run a major Japanese electronics firm. Stringer helped to reinvigorate the company's struggling media businesses, encouraging blockbusters such as Spider-Man while cutting 9,000 jobs.[15] He hoped to sell off peripheral business and focus the company again on electronics.[17] Furthermore, he aimed to increase cooperation between business units,[17] which he described as "silos" operating in isolation from one another.[18] In a bid to provide a unified brand for its global operations, Sony introduced a slogan known as "make.believe" in 2009.[citation needed]
Despite some successes, the company faced continued struggles in the mid- to late-2000s.[15] In 2012, Kazuo Hirai was promoted to president and CEO, replacing Sir Howard Stringer. Shortly thereafter, Hirai outlined his company-wide initiative, named "One Sony" to revive Sony from years of financial losses and bureaucratic management structure, which proved difficult for former CEO Stringer to accomplish, partly due to differences in business culture and native languages between Stringer and some of Sony's Japanese divisions and subsidiaries. Hirai outlined three major areas of focus for Sony's electronics business, which include imaging technology, gaming and mobile technology, as well as a focus on reducing the major losses from the television business.[19]
In February 2014, Sony announced the sale of its Vaio PC division to a new corporation owned by investment fund Japan Industrial Partners and spinning its TV division into its own corporation as to make it more nimble to turn the unit around from past losses totaling $7.8 billion over a decade.[20] Later that month, they announced that they would be closing 20 stores.[21] In April, the company announced that they would be selling 9.5 million shares in Square Enix (roughly 8.2 percent of the game company's total shares) in a deal worth approximately $48 million.[22] In May 2014 the company announced it was forming two joint ventures with Shanghai Oriental Pearl Group to manufacture and market Sony's PlayStation games consoles and associated software in China.[23]
Sony has historically been notable for creating its own in-house standards for new recording and storage technologies, instead of adopting those of other manufacturers and standards bodies. Sony (either alone or with partners) has introduced several of the most popular recording formats, including the floppy disk, Compact Disc and Blu-ray Disc.
Sony Corporation is the electronics business unit and the parent company of the Sony Group. It primarily conducts strategic business planning of the group, research and development (R&D), planning, designing and marketing for electronics products. Its subsidiaries such as Sony EMCS (Engineering/Manufacturing/Customer Service) Corporation (6 plants in Japan), Sony Semiconductor Corporation (7 plants in Japan) and its subsidiaries outside Japan (Brazil, China, UK (Wales), India, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Ireland and United States) are responsible for manufacturing as well as product engineering (Sony EMCS is also responsible for customer service operations). In 2012, Sony rolled most of its consumer content services (including video, music and gaming) into the Sony Entertainment Network.
Sony Computer Entertainment is best known for producing the popular line of PlayStation consoles. The line grew out of a failed partnership with Nintendo. Originally, Nintendo requested for Sony to develop an add-on for its console that would play Compact Discs. In 1991 Sony announced the add-on, as well as a dedicated console known as the "Play Station". However, a disagreement over software licensing for the console caused the partnership to fall through. Sony then continued the project independently.
Launched in 1994, the first PlayStation gained 61% of global console sales and broke Nintendo's long-standing lead in the market.[44] Sony followed up with the PlayStation 2 in 2000, which was even more successful. The console has become the most successful of all time, selling over 150 million units as of 2011. Sony released the PlayStation 3, a high-definition console, in 2006. It was the first console to use the Blu-ray format, although its expensive[18] Cell processor made it considerably more expensive than competitors Xbox 360 and Wii. Early on, poor sales performance resulted in significant losses for the company, pushing it to sell the console at a loss.[45] The PlayStation 3 sold generally more poorly than its competitors in the early years of its release but managed to overtake the Xbox 360 in global sales later on.[46] It later introduced the PlayStation Move, an accessory that allows players to control video games using motion gestures.
Sony extended the brand to the portable games market in 2005 with the PlayStation Portable (PSP). The console has sold reasonably, but has taken a second place to a rival handheld, the Nintendo DS. Sony developed the Universal Media Disc (UMD) optical disc medium for use on the PlayStation Portable. Early on, the format was used for movies, but it has since lost major studio support. Sony released a disc-less version of its PlayStation Portable, the PSP Go. The company went on to release its second portable video game system, PlayStation Vita, in 2011 and 2012. Sony launched its fourth console, the PlayStation 4, on 15 November 2013, which as of 1 March 2015 has sold 20.2 million units.[47]
On 18 March 2014, at GDC, President of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida announced their new virtual reality technology dubbed Project Morpheus, and later named PlayStation VR, for PlayStation 4. The headset, still in prototype form, will bring VR gaming and non-gaming software to the company's new console. According to a report released by Houston-based patent consulting firm LexInnova in May 2015, Sony is leading the virtual reality patent race. According to the firm’s analysis of nearly 12,000 patents or patent applications, Sony has 366 virtual reality patents or patent applications.
#4theplayers
>portmanteau of Kuso-Oni
>lives up to its name on an hourly basis
>>320236372
what did he mean by this?
>>320228910
Don't mind Sony.
Don't like consoles.
