Sooner or later
Everybody’s kingdom must end

"The King Must Die"
Elton John

All hail Samsung.

There’s a reason all the network TV shows skew young.  They’re advertiser supported.  And advertisers want to reach young ‘uns.  Get them addicted to their brands in their formative years, where’ll they stay, hopefully, forever more.

I go back to Sony transistors.  And reel to reel tape decks.  They were the coolest.  They had the best design.  They had cachet.

And then came the Trinitron.  The hype was convincing.  There was one gun.  You could SEE the sharpness.

And, of course, I bought a Walkman.

I was addicted to Sony.

But people under the age of twenty have lived through none of the above.  They’re not addicted to the radio, and if they listen to music it’s on an Apple iPod.  When it comes to television, buy Korean.  Why pay a premium for Sony when Samsung is BETTER!  Furthermore, kids know Samsung from cell phones, their initial high tech purchase, what they’re addicted to.  Sony Ericsson cell phones are a joke.  Known for quality and reception problems.

All Sony has going for it is the PlayStation.  And even there, Microsoft is nipping at its heels with the Xbox 360.  Which is going to be on the market BEFORE Sony’s latest iteration of its game console.

Call it mismanagement.

What was Sony doing getting into the content business.  Matsushita learned the error of its ways.  It sold Universal to Bronfman.  But Sony has held on to Sony Music and Sony Pictures.  The latter of which had a few good years recently under John Calley, but his tenure is history and the studio is in the doghouse again.  This is a classic case of brand dilution.  What does Sony STAND for?  But now it’s worse.  The content companies are negatively impacting the electronics business.

I’m not sure why Howard Stringer is seen as such a genius.  There are no great victories on his resume.  And his appointment of Andy Lack to be head of Sony Music will ultimately be not only his undoing, but the entire company’s downfall.  In one fell swoop Sony has succeeded in alienating an entire generation of potential customers.  Who have PLENTY of other places to go.

What Sony needed wasn’t an English-speaking manager but to shed its content divisions and give control of the remaining electronics business to the man responsible for the PlayStation.  We’ve seen this movie before, with Apple Computer.  Slick marketer John Sculley just about ran the company into the ground.  It was mercurial techie Steve Jobs who resuscitated it.  After all, a corporation’s ultimate customers are those shelling out dough for its products, not Wall Street analysts.  The only chance Sony has of coming back is great products.  But even that has been botched.

Sony MP3 players are now eclipsed in sales by the iPod in the company’s HOME MARKET of Japan! 
iPod exposes lame Japanese competitors

Sony leads nowhere.  And does a bad job of following up.

Why doesn’t the company license its music to Apple in Australia?  What is it trying to prove, other than it’s an ignorant isolationist?

Furthermore, there’s the ridiculousness of the music company issuing copy-protected CDs and the computer division hyping a PC capable of burning 100 CDs at a time.

But what’s worst is the PERCEPTION of the company.

Corporations are not much different from musical acts.  They’re sustained on image and credibility.  In one fell swoop Andy Lack and his minions have eviscerated Sony’s image and credibility.  Not only of its MUSIC division, but of ALL its myriad parts.  What made Sony a success was its BRAND!  Which has to be managed and massaged at all costs.  By not realizing this was his mission, by only thinking about the short term bottom line. Andy Lack has negatively impacted the entire company forever.  Just take a gander at what people are saying about the company:
Railing at Sony BMG, Disguised as a Review

Never mind the negative impact of the class action lawsuit:
Texas sues Sony BMG for ‘spyware’ on CDs

Not only did Sony Music fuck up, they didn’t handle their fuck-up well.  And isn’t it interesting that all the negative publicity has been directed at SONY, not BMG.  But, you see, BMG doesn’t have a stellar brand name in the U.S.  Bertelsmann is a faceless corporation.  The average person is unaware that the Germany company owns Random House.

Watch this closely.  Sony is ill-prepared for the future.  It’s got no hot products other than the PlayStation.  It’s never going to come back, it’s going to fall back, to middle of the pack at best.