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is one of the world's largest media conglomerates founded in Tokyo, Japan. One of its divisions Sony Electronics is one of the leading manufacturers of electronics, video, communications, and information technology products for the consumer and professional markets.

Sony Corporation is the parent company of the Sony Group and is engaged in business through its six operating segments - electronics, music, games, pictures, financial services and other. These make Sony one of the most comprehensive entertainment companies in the world. Sony's principal U.S. businesses include Sony Electronics Inc., Sony Pictures Entertainment, Sony Computer Entertainment America Inc., and a 50% interest in Sony BMG Music Entertainment, the second-largest record company in the world.

Sony recorded consolidated annual sales of approximately $67 billion for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2005, and it employs 151,400 people worldwide. Sony's consolidated sales in the U.S. for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2005 were $18.4 billion. As a semiconductor maker, Sony is among the Worldwide Top 20 Semiconductor Sales Leaders.

History

In 1945, after World War II, Masaru Ibuka started a radio repair shop in a bombed-out building in Tokyo. The next year he was joined by his colleague Akio Morita, and they founded a company called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K., which translates in English to Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation. The company built Japan's first tape recorder called the Type-G.

In the early 1950s, Ibuka traveled in the United States and heard about Bell Labs' invention of the transistor. He convinced Bell to license the transistor technology to his Japanese company. While most American companies were researching the transistor for its military applications, Ibuka looked to apply it to communications. While the American companies Regency and Texas Instruments built transistor radios first, it was Ibuka's company that made the first commercially successful transistor radios.

In August 1955, Sony produced its first coat-pocket sized transistor radio they registered as the TR-55 model. In 1956, Sony reportedly manufactured about 40,000 of its Model TR-72 box-like portable transistor radios and exported the model to North America, the Netherlands and Germany.

That same year they made the TR-6, a coat pocket radio which was used by the company to create its "SONY boy" advertising character. The following year, 1957, Sony came out with the TR-63 model, then the smallest (112 x 71 x 32 mm) transistor radio in commercial production. It was a worldwide commercial success.

University of Arizona professor Michael Brian Schiffer, Ph.D., says, "Sony was not first, but its transistor radio was the most successful. The TR-63 of 1957 cracked open the U.S. market and launched the new industry of consumer microelectronics." By the mid 1950s, American teens had began buying portable transistor radios in huge numbers, helping to propel the fledgling industry from an estimated 100,000 units in 1955 to 5,000,000 units by the end of 1958. However, this huge growth in portable transistor radio sales that saw Sony rise to be the dominant player in the consumer electronics field How Transistor Radios and Web and Newspapers and Hifi Radio Are Alike was not because of the consumers who had bought the earlier generation of tube radio consoles, but was driven by a distinctly new American phenomenon at the time called Rock and Roll.

Company Name

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 TKK.

The name "Sony" was chosen for the brand as a mix of the Latin word sonus, which is the root of sonic and sound, the English word "sunny", and from the word Sonny-boys which is Japanese slang for "whiz kids". However "Sonny" was thought to sound too much like the Japanese saying soh-nee which means "business goes bad", Akio Morita pushed for a word that does not exist in any language so that they could claim the word "Sony" as their own (which paid off when they sued a candy producer who also used the name who claimed that "Sony" was just an existing word in some language).

At the time of the change, it was extremely unusual for a Japanese company to use Roman letters instead of Chinese characters to spell its name. 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.

Sony Electronics' notable products and technologies

See also: List of Sony Trademarks
A * denotes a proprietary format. Question marks indicate products no longer sold as of 2006 with an unknown year of withdrawal.

1950s

1960s

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000s

Future

Question marks indicate products no longer sold as of 2006, but the year of withdrawal is unknown

Sony is one of the few electronics companies with manufacturing and assembly plants in the United States of America.

Management

On March 7 2005, Sony Corp. announced that Nobuyuki Idei will step down as Chairman and Group CEO and will be replaced by Briton Sir Howard Stringer, current Chairman and CEO of Sony Corporation of America, Corporate Executive Officer, Vice Chairman and COO Sony Entertainment Business Group. Sony's decision to replace Idei with the British Howard Stringer will mark the first time that a foreigner will run a major Japanese electronics firm. Sony Corp. also announced on the same date that current president, Kunitake Ando, will step down and be replaced by Ryoji Chubachi. http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press/200503/05-014E/index.html

Mergers & Acquisitions

Corporate governance

Current members of the board of directors of Sony are: Peter Bonfeld, Ryoji Chubachi, Sakie Fukushima, Hirobumi Kawano, Yotaro Kobayashi, Göran Lindahl, Yoshihiko Miyauchi, Akishige Okada, Howard Stringer, Fueo Sumita, and Yoshiaki Yamauchi.

Proprietary formats

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. The most infamous of these was the videotape format war of the early 1980s, when Sony marketed its Betamax system for video cassette recorders against the VHS format developed by JVC. In the end, VHS gained critical mass in the marketplace and became the worldwide standard for consumer VCRs and Sony adopted the format. Since then, Sony has continued to introduce its own versions of storage technologies, with varying success. Examples include -
  • Video8/Hi8/Digital8 - In 1985, Sony introduced the Handycam, one of the first Video8 cameras. Much smaller than the competition's VHS and Betamax video cameras, Video8 became very popular in the consumer camcorder market.
  • MiniDisc was created by Sony for use in portable music players. They were designed to share the market of Walkman products. Low consumer adoption has seen the product fail outside of the Japanese market.
  • Sony also makes heavy use of its Memory Stick flash memory cards for digital cameras and other portable devices; however, other manufacturers are also making use of this technology.
  • One successful attempt was the introduction of the 90mm micro floppy diskettes (better known as 3.5inch floppy disks), which Sony had developed at a time when there were 4" floppy disks and a lot of variations from different companies to replace the then on-going 5.25" floppy disks. Sony had great success and the format became dominant; 3.5" floppy disks gradually became obsolete as they were replaced by more current media formats.
  • The DVD format currently being used in households world wide was jointly developed by Philips and Sony to replace CD; the use of a shorter wavelength laser beam sees the higher storage capacity of 4.7-17+GB as opposed to 640-700MB on a single disc.
  • Sony attempted, unsuccessfully, to compete with the Iomega Zip drive and Imation SuperDisk with their HiFD.
  • In 1993 Sony challenged the industry standard Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound format with its newer and more advanced proprietary motion picture digital audio format called SDDS (Sony Dynamic Digital Sound). This format employed eight channels (7.1) of audio opposed to just six used in Dolby Digital 5.1 at the time. Unlike Dolby Digital, SDDS utilized a method of backup by having mirrored arrays of bits on both sides of the film which acted as a measure of reliability in case the film was partially damaged. Ultimately, SDDS has been vastly overshadowed by the preferred DTS (Digital Theatre System) and Dolby Digital standards in the motion picture industry. SDDS was solely developed for use in the theatre circuit; Sony never intended to develop a home theatre version of SDDS.
  • Since the introduction of the MiniDisc format, Sony has attempted to promote its own audio compression technologies under the ATRAC brand, against more widely-used formats like MP3. Until late 2004, Sony's Network Walkman line of digital portable music players did not support the MP3 de facto standard natively, although the software SonicStage provided with them would convert MP3 files into the ATRAC or ATRAC3 formats.
  • Sony is currently touting its Blu-ray optical disc format, which is likely to compete with Toshiba's HD DVD. As of quarter one of 2006, Blu-Ray has the backing of every major motion picture studio except Universal.
  • Sony and Philips jointly developed the Sony-Philips digital interface format (S/PDIF).
  • Sony and Philips introduced the high-fidelity audio system SACD in 1999, but it has since been entrenched in a format war with DVD-Audio. At present, neither has gained a major foothold with the general public. CDs are preferred by consumers because of their ubiquitous presence in consumer devices.
  • OpenMG, a digital rights management system.
  • ARccOS, a copy control system for DVDs.
  • Universal Media Disc (UMD) is an optical disc medium developed by Sony for use on the PlayStation Portable. It can hold 1.8 gigabytes of data, which can include games, movies, music, or a combination thereof. As of July 2006, UMD is believed to be a nearly-abandoned movie format.
  • MpegMovieVX (Also known as MPEG-VX, EX and HQX) is the video format used in Sony Cybershot digital still cameras. It's a proprietary implementation of the MPEG1 standard, which Sony first used in their DSC-F55 model in 1999 and has been using ever since. The format is undocumented and has only recently been reverse engineered by the company Makayama, who use it in their consumer software Digital Camera Media Studio http://www.makayama.com/digitalcamera.html.

Controversies

Fictitious movie reviewer

In July 2000, a marketing executive working for Sony Corporation created a fictitious film critic, David Manning, who gave consistently good reviews for releases from Sony subsidiary Columbia Pictures, which generally received poor reviews amongst real critics.

Digital rights management

In October 2005, it was revealed by Mark Russinovich of Sysinternals that Sony BMG Music Entertainment's music CDs had installed a rootkit on the user's computer as a DRM measure (called Extended Copy Protection by its creator, British company First 4 Internet), which was extremely difficult to detect or to remove. This constitutes a crime in many countries, and poses a major security risk to affected users, as well as a small drain on computer system resources. Users may even damage their computer while trying to uninstall it, a fact that drew further criticism of Sony's actions. SonyBMG is facing several class action lawsuits regarding this matter.

Advertisements

To commemorate the tenth anniversary of the PlayStation (PS) gaming console in Italy, Sony released an ad depicting a man smiling towards the camera and wearing on his head a crown made of button symbols (Triangle, O, X, Square). At the bottom, the copy read as "Ten Years of Passion". This outraged the Vatican as well as many local Catholic believers, prompting comments such as "Sony went too far" and "Vatican excommunicates Sony". After the incident, the campaign was quickly discontinued.

Sony also admitted in late 2005 to hiring graffiti artists to spraypaint advertisements for their Playstation Portable game system in seven major US cities including New York, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and San Francisco, California. The mayor of Philadelphia has filed a cease and desist order and may file a criminal complaint. According to Sony, they are paying businesses and building owners for the right to graffiti their walls. Wired News As of early January 2006, Sony has no plans to keep or withdraw them.

In July 2006, Sony released a Dutch advertising campaign featuring a white model dressed entirely in white and a black model garbed in black. The first ad featured the white model clutching the face of the black model. The words "White is coming" headlined one of the ads. The ad has been viewed as racist by critics. A Sony spokesperson responded that the ad does not have a racist message saying it was only trying to depict the contrast between the black PSP model and the new ceramic white PSP. Other pictures of the ad campaign includes the black model overpowering the white model.[http://www.joystiq.com/2006/07/04/ad-critic-sonys-racially-charged-psp-ad/

Legal

In 2002, Sony Computer Entertainment America, marketer of the popular PlayStation game consoles, was sued by Immersion Corp. of San Jose, California which claimed that Sony's PlayStation "Dual Shock" controllers infringed on Immersion's patents. In 2004, a federal jury agreed with Immersion, awarding the company US$82 million in damages. A U.S. district court judge ruled on the matter in March, 2005 and not only agreed with the federal jury's ruling but also added another US$8.7 million in damages. Washington Post: Pay Judgment Or Game Over, Sony Warned

Consumer criticism

Many of Sony's proprietary measures for media including MiniDisk, Betamax tapes, and other media has generated public outcry. Due to JVC's willingness to license the VHS format to other vendours, Sony's Betamax has been thwarted out of consumer production (it is still used for professional editing due to its superior quality) rendering it a marketing flop. A growing number of consumers complain that Sony's electronic products are no longer as durable as in the past *.

Trivia

  • In the 1990 movie Crazy People, the character played by Dudley Moore and his advertising team show the successful campaign to Sony, the final of the movie shows the TV spot of the company.

See also

References

  • Made in Japan by Akio Morita and SONY, Harper Collins (1994)
  • SONY: The Private Life by John Nathan, Houghton Mifflin (1999)
  • SONY Radio, Sony Transistor Radio 35th Anniversary 1955-1990 - information booklet (1990)
  • The Portable Radio in American Life by University of Arizona Professor Michael Brian Schiffer, Ph.D. (The University of Arizona Press, 1991).
  • The Japan Project: Made in Japan. - a documentary about Sony's early history in the US by Terry Sanders.

External links

Companies headquartered in Tokyo | Electronics companies | Electronics companies of Japan | Sony | 1946 establishments

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