Sony

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Template:Infobox Company; Template:Nyse) | 

 foundation     = May 7 1946 (in 1958, company took on current name) |
 location       = Shinagawa, Tokyo, Japan |
 key_people     = Howard Stringer: Chairman and CEO; Ryoji Chubachi: President and Electronics CEO |
 num_employees  = 151,400 |
 industry       = Audio & Video equipment; financial services |
 products       = Consumer Electronics including television, digital cameras and camcorders, mobile audio and personal computers; Semiconductors; Electronic Components; PlayStation; Gaming (online); Music, Movies, and TV Program Content; others |
 revenue        = Template:Profit $71.216 billion USD (2004)|
 homepage       = Sony.net

}}

Template:Nihongo is an international leading manufacturer of video, communications, and information technology products for the consumer and professional market. Its music, motion picture, television, computer entertainment, and online businesses 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.

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Short history

Shirokiya, which was one of Japan's oldest companies (founded 1662), operated department stores. Shortly after the original store was rebuilt in 1924, it featured a state-of-the-art research and development division that created rice cookers, tape recorders and electric cushions, all under the Shirokiya brand. However, as Shirokiya's fortunes waned, the head researchers, Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita departed in 1946, taking all 20 employees with them. They then founded Sony on May 7, 1946 as the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering. Their first consumer product, in the late 1940s, was a rice cooker, which was a spectacular failure. As it grew into a major international corporation, Sony acquired other companies with longer histories, including Columbia Records (the oldest continuously produced brand name in recorded sound, dating back to 1888). Today Norio Ohga is Honorary Chairman, Sir Howard Stringer is Chairman and CEO, and Ryoji Chubachi is President and Electronics CEO.

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Brand change

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" seemed not to be appropriate since it sounds too much like the Japanese 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.

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 some of this 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, the then smallest (112 x 71 x 32 mm) set in commercial production. and a great sales success worldwide. The TR-63 was a shirt pocket transistor radio that was exported all over the world.

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 whatever 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, [1] 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.

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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.

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1950s

Image:Reel-to-reel recorder tc-630.jpg

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1960s

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1970s

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1980s

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1990s

Image:Ps2v.jpg

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2000 – present

Image:W800.jpg

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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.

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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. [2]

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Acquisitions

Sony also owns television channels in India and channels aimed at Indian communities in Europe. In Latin America, it owns Sony Entertainment Television, a TV channel that broadcasts popular series from the major networks in the US with subtitles in Spanish and Portuguese (Brazil only).

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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.

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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 -

  • 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 discs), which Sony had developed at a time when there were 4" floppy discs and a lot of variations from different companies to replace the then on-going 5.25" floppy discs. Sony had great success and the format became dominant; 3.5" floppy discs 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 both the motion picture industry and home audio formats.
  • 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 digital versatile disk 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.
  • The PSP (PlayStation Portable) handheld gaming system uses the proprietary Universal Media Disc (UMD) format to distribute games, movies, and other media. The Memory Stick format is used for game saves and other multimedia features.
  • 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.
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Criticism

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Fictitious movie reviewer

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

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Digital rights management

In August 2000 Sony Pictures Entertainment US senior VP Steve Heckler foreshadowed events of late 2005. Heckler told attendees at the Americas Conference on Information Systems "The industry will take whatever steps it needs to protect itself and protect its revenue streams...It will not lose that revenue stream, no matter what...Sony is going to take aggressive steps to stop this. We will develop technology that transcends the individual user. We will firewall Napster at source - we will block it at your cable company, we will block it at your phone company, we will block it at your [ISP]. We will firewall it at your PC...These strategies are being aggressively pursued because there is simply too much at stake."

In October 2005, it was revealed by Mark Russinovich of Sysinternals that Sony BMG Music Entertainment's music CD's 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. Sony is facing several class action lawsuits regarding this matter. This is discussed in detail at 2005 Sony CD copy protection controversy.

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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.</br>

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, 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. As of early January 2006, Sony has not commented on the advertisements or on plans to keep or withdraw them.

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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

In November of 2005, Sony was identified as distributing aggressive Digital Rights Management software that took on the characteristics of rootkits and spyware. In relation to the so-called Extended Copy Protection application, Sony is already being sued in California, New York,[3], and Texas [4] in the United States, with similar legal inquiries underway in Canada and Italy.

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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.
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See also

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Documentaries

  • The story of Sony's foray into the American commercial market is documented in Terry Sanders' film The Japan Project: Made in Japan.
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References

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External links

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