String
er joined Sony in 1997 and became chairman/CEO of Sony Corp. of America the following year. When he was named to head the worldwide parent firm Sony in 2005 he saw what he called "silos" because of Sony's vertical integration. "Each product category was its own ‘silo.' PlayStation was a silo. All the divisions were in their own little worlds. There was no sharing of information between these divisions and little acknowledgement of software."
What he did was to try and break down the silos with a program called "Sony United," which, Stringer said, "was not original and sounds like a [soccer] team." But the program got Sony engineers from across the company to begin talking to each other and sharing experiences.
He explained that Sony "has 30,000 products. We have highly skilled hardware and software engineers. We knew what we wanted to do but didn't know how to execute the vision."
The TV host reminded Stringer that Sony had its own version of iPod in the works before Apple did. The Sony chairman explained, "In 1997 we were working with IBM on electronic music distribution and could have put this out five years earlier [than iPod]. But we couldn't get our people to understand software. And we are a music company. They saw digital media, panicked and didn't like it." In the end Sony designed a closed music system that didn't work.
In talking about current products, when asked about Apple's iPhone Stringer said, "The good news is that Steve Jobs spotted a trend that we've seen. The phone is a convergence device, between music and a phone. We are all building variations on the same theme. We have sold plenty of Walkman phones [from Sony Ericsson], especially in Europe."
While Stringer is pleased with Sony's cellular phone progress, "I would never sit up here and say I'm not worried about Steve Jobs. I wouldn't bet against Steve. "About Blu-ray vs. HD DVD, Stringer was more pointed: "We are selling 3-to-1 vs. them. We have exclusives with Disney, Fox, Sony [and Lion's Gate] and they have the top 15 of 20 movies at the moment. At some point Blu-ray will take over based on ... this support."
He described HD DVD as a "transitional technology" that has "an exclusive with Universal ... so good luck to them. When hit titles came out last year, more came out on Blu ray."
