Interesting quote about the founders of Sony from Businessweek’s What Is Sony Now?
Sony sprouted from the post-World War II rubble of Japan to become the embodiment of that country’s recovery and rise as a world economic power. The company was founded by two charismatic men who could get almost anything they wanted done. Masaru Ibuka was the restless inventor who pushed Sony’s engineers to new heights of technical prowess. The equally gadget-happy Akio Morita supplied the vision of what consumers wanted—sometimes before consumers themselves knew it—and transformed audio and video devices into money printers.
For the past nine years, the business that has accumulated more profit than the rest of Sony combined is financial services, mostly life insurance, with some auto insurance and banking. “Sony,” [Jeff] Loff says, “is a life insurance company with a money-losing TV business.”
No product haunts Sony more than Apple’s iPod. Before Apple introduced it in 2001, followed by the iTunes Music Store in 2003, Sony was working with other companies on devices that would download music, Stringer says. “Steve Jobs figured it out, we figured it out, we didn’t execute.”
Execution is everything.
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