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How Sony Lost $1 Billion PDF Print E-mail
Written by D. Eric Franks   
Saturday, 16 May 2009 15:53

This is certainly hyperbole, but I think we can now say for certain how Sony lost $1 billion dollars last year or at least we can pin the blame on a single person:  Sony Pictures Entertainment chief executive officer Michael Lynton.

As I wrote the other day, Sony's biggest avoidable mistake in the last decade was failing to pair its brilliant, innovative and industry-leading portable audio hardware (a.k.a., the Walkman) with its brilliant, innovative and industry-leading media and content (i.e., Sony Music, Artista, Columbia, RCA and... wait for it... Sony Picutres). I speculated wildly and without any evidence that "Sony is a massive company and it is unsurprising that the two (or certainly more) divisions would operate in complete seclusion from one another, oblivious to how they could possibly work together, without some sort of explicit and forceful external pressure (i.e., a priority mandate from the CEO)."

Well, wild speculation aside, it turns out that not only was there a serious lack of imagination, but there was (and is) apparently active opposition to pulling it all together (Sony Walkman + Sony Media). Accorting to Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton:

“I’m a guy who doesn’t see anything good having come from the Internet. Period.”

Now, we can ignore the fact that this is almost certainly a rhetorically hyperbolic statement all by itself. I'm assuming he uses the Internet to find all sorts of information that, a decade ago, was either (a) only available if you walked to your local library or (b) wasn't available at all. And I'm assuming he's found some entertainment online, maybe looking at lolcatz pictures or dancing hamsters. But still: Saying that there's nothing good about the Internet is silly. It's like saying nothing good has come from modern medicine, the printing press or that the wheel was a mistake. Yes, you can find people who believe such things, but they aren't CEOs of major corporations.

References:
* Sony Loses $1 Billion Dollars
* Bad Internet
* Stringer Sticks Knife Deeper Into Sony, Forbes, May 14, 2009.

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