Sony is now officially 53 years old and what a 53 years its been. Masaru Ibuka started Sony, humbly, in post-war Japan above a department store. Their opening charter warned, “We must avoid problems which befall large corporations.” Sony then, which was known as Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Company was quoted as saying should “create and introduce technologies which large corporations cannot match” and that the company was founded” and that the company was founded “to establish of an ideal factory that stresses a spirit of freedom and open-mindedness, and where engineers with sincere motivation can exercise their technological skills to the highest level…the organization would bring untold pleasure and tremendous results, regardless of the meagerness of its facilities or the limited number of employees.”

Well, it seems like somewhere down the line, I would say, in the early 2000’s, the vision was lost and Sony fell behind and companies like Apple and Microsoft and Samsung all took aim and gained grounds. With Apple with their iPhone and iPods dismantelling the Walkman and making the Sony Ericsson line irrelevant. Then, Samsung has taken a hard aim at Sony and their television and home electronics lineup. From there, the obvious Playstation vs Xbox battle with Microsoft and of course, smaller fights with the Sony eReader vs the Amazon Kindle and others. But all is not doom and gloom. , Sir Howard Stringer, Sony’s first foreign CEO, was recently quoted as saying that, “We can no longer say that we’re right and our customers are wrong. We can’t build only what we want to build.” Although Sony has a lot of problems, I believe they have the capability with proper leadership to not only fend of competition, but gain back now lost ground. More on that in our next segment.