Sony: It's time to try harder

Matt Rivera / msnbc.com

Sony president and CEO Howard Stringer clowned around with actor Will Smith and director Barry Sonnenfeld on Sony's stage at the Las Vegas Convention Center on Monday.

By Suzanne Choney

Sony, a company whose name was once synonymous with electronics greatness, came to the Consumer Electronics Show this year as just one of the crowd?? a company with some new TVs, cameras and phones. The company's top executives explain why they're not further ahead by blaming past mistakes, and outline plans to rectify them. Assuming, of course, that?it's not too late.

TV
Sony is now behind Samsung as the top TV brand worldwide, something that was once unimaginable. Two years ago Sony was first with an 11-inch OLED TV; but in recent days, both Samsung and LG are showing off 55-inch OLED TVs, while Sony is not. OLED has thinner and more efficient technology than LCDs, and offers much better contrast.

Sony markets professional OLED monitors up to 25 inches in size, but the company is staying out of the larger-screen OLED TV space for now. Instead it's focusing on a new "Crystal" LED TV prototype, which uses an array of tiny LEDs to create a picture. It's a daring move, but one has to wonder what happened to the OLED agenda.

"OLED is something we will continue to look at," said Kaz Hirai, president and group CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment on Tuesday at a roundtable with reporters. But, he added, "We don't have anything to talk about right now."

Hirai is considered by many as the next likely president of Sony, succeeding Sir Howard Stringer, who could possibly remain on as chairman and CEO (positions he currently holds). Recent reports of leadership change have created additional tensions at the executive level, evident at the awkward Sony press briefing Monday where Stringer, former president of CBS, was not his usual over-the-top blustery and overconfident self.

Asked Tuesday about word of Apple TV's possible emergence onto the TV scene, Stringer was straightforward: Apple, he said, "married" hardware and software "more effectively at the beginning of the century than we did. We've been trying very hard to catch up."

Whether "in the end" Apple comes up with a "more elegant solution" for a TV is what Sony is interested in; Sony still has "far more products than anybody else," Stringer said.

"We're in the game; (Apple is) a fierce competitor."

One thing Apple could bring to TVs is more simplicity; connected TVs are still complex stuff for many consumers.?

"One of the things we at Sony need to do?? and perhaps the electronics industry as a whole when it comes to TVs and connectivity?? is to get the message out to our customers," said Hirai. "We have to make sure the connectivity is as easy as possible, (and) promote and talk about that excitement."

Meanwhile, last month Sony said it plans to sell its nearly 50 percent stake in an LCD joint venture with competitor Samsung to the company for $940 million.

Sony wants to regain its domination in the TV field by spring of 2014, and Stringer believes that the "high end" of the market is "where we will lead the recovery; it's what we do best."

Whether the economy will be ready for more high-end-TVs then isn't in anyone's crystal ball, although Sony's "Crystal" is in the company's sights.

Phone and tablet
Sony is way behind on the phone front, with Samsung ? and Apple ? again beating it out worldwide as leading manufacturers. Sony hopes its $1.5 billion acquisition of phone partner Ericsson will help make up for crucial lost years in the smartphone world.

"Sony had to make this deal as it had run out of options, but integration challenges could prove to be a major hurdle," Ben Wood, head of research at consultancy CCS Insight, told Reuters recently.

"As a major consumer electronics player, lack of mobile assets had become a liability for Sony, particularly when compared with Samsung, whose telecommunication business creates nearly half of its profits."

Matt Rivera / msnbc.com

Sony's Kaz Hirai at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas Monday.

Sony hopes its new 4G LTE Xperia Ion, the first new phone from the company's renamed Sony Mobile Communications wing, will excite customers when it hits?the U.S. via AT&T in the second quarter of the year. Sony is betting it will?be the first of many successes from the revamped mobile unit. The phone, with an aluminum body, has a 12-megapixel camera.

Sony's 9.4-inch Tablet S, released last fall, has received good reviews, but it still faces a huge hurdle against Apple's iPad, Amazon's Kindle Fire, Samsung's Galaxy tablets and the 300 million other Android tablets from lesser brands that have come out in the last 18 months.

At last year's Consumer Electronics Show, Stringer said Sony would aim to come in behind Apple as the world's second largest maker of tablet devices by 2012. That's not likely to happen. The company recently dropped the price of the Tablet S by $100 to $400 for the 16GB version and $500 for the 32GB model, and is planning to introduce a second, foldable tablet with two 5.5-inch screens.

Content and services
With its huge inventory of games, music, movies and TV shows, Sony has yet to find a way to make its own Sony Entertainment Network get the kind of consumer engagement enjoyed by Apple's iTunes, or even Netflix. Sony's Entertainment Network includes Music Unlimited and Video Unlimited; its strongest unit is the PlayStation Network.

"How we use our content will be critical to the success of our Sony Entertainment Network," Stringer said Tuesday. But a strategy for that has yet to emerge. Nor is sharing it with others an option: "Why should we surrender it to another system when we have it ourselves?" he said.

All three of Sony's networks were plagued by a massive data breach last spring that resulted in more than 100 million accounts being compromised and the networks being shut down for weeks. In July, some irate Sony shareholders called for Stringer's resignation, and the Sony board cut his and Hirai's pay, according to reports.

Video games
A bright part of Sony's business, hacker breach notwithstanding, has been the PlayStation console, and Sony has high expectations for its new PlayStation Vita handheld console, coming to the U.S. and Europe Feb. 22. Yet after an initial spike, PS Vita sales apparently flagged. (Sony said that a half-million Vitas have been sold so far.) And, coming to the U.S., Sony faces stiff competition from the iPhone and Android devices ??even, it's worth noting, Sony's own PlayStation-certified phones and tablets.

Stringer, despite the challenges and the criticism, remains certain the company will have a strong future: "What's unique about Sony is that we have a stake in every path in the digital revolution," he said Tuesday. "We create some of the most futuristic products in the world."

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Source: http://gadgetbox.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/11/10097707-sony-its-time-to-try-harder

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