Kaz Hirai to Step Down as CEO, Be Replaced by Jack Tretton

Jack_Tretton_Kaz_Hirai_1For the past two months, there has been plenty of turmoil at Sony. While things seemed to be going well for Sony in 2013 with the company starting to experience growth in mobile and coming off of a fantastic PS4 launch, 2014 has quickly turned into a black mark for the struggling Japanese giant. In the last few months, we’ve seen no shortage of departures from PlayStation, including high level departures at Naughty Dog and a massive layoff at Santa Monica Studios. The reach of turmoil unfortunately has not been limited to PlayStation as Jack Tretton, President and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America and one of the division’s earliest executives when it was founded in 1995, is stepping down at the end of March. Since the start of the new year, Sony has announced the closure of 60% of their retail stores in the US, the closing of VAIO, and is even spinning off their Bravia television business. To top that all of this, Masaru Kato, the company’s CFO is departing after 31 years.

While some sites have attempted to connect the dots between events, they’ve so far been unsuccessful at figuring out just what went wrong at Sony. Now, thanks to an insider, we’ve come to learn the real reason behind all the turmoil at Sony and it involves Jack Tretton and Kaz Hirai.

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Jack Tretton and current Sony CEO, Kaz Hirai, share a lot of history. Before being tapped at the successor of Sir Howard Stringer, Kaz Hirai led one of Sony’s brightest divisions: PlayStation. In fact, one of the reasons Kaz was able to become CEO of Sony was for his performance at PlayStation. Once Kaz took on the job of CEO, Jack Tretton was promoted as the head of SCEA. During his time at the helm of PlayStation, Tretton has overseen the release of The Last of Us, a resurgence of the PS Vita within the indie community, and a massively successful launch of the PS4 that has continued to be sold out nearly 6 months after its launch. For those same reasons, it came as a shock when Tretton recently announced his intention to depart with PlayStation.

Now, we’ve come to learn that many within Sony have been unhappy with how Kaz has been handling Sony. In fact, insiders are telling us that even during Kaz’s reign over PlayStation, that it was really Tretton who was running the show and only because of his actions was the PS3 finally able to outsell the Xbox 360. With Tretton stepping down at head of PlayStation, the Sony board hopes to be able to sidestep Kaz and hire Tretton as CEO. Attempting to promote him through the normal chains might cause a bitter internal power struggle within the company that could have hugely negative consequences.

#AprilFools

Discuss:

Are you surprised to learn that Sony is looking to replace Kaz Hirai with Jack Tretton?