Walkman, Trinitron e PlayStation. Marcas que reflectem a atitude de uma empresa que há muito deixou de seguir os seus princípios.
De facto, já houve uma altura em que a Sony ditava tendências na electrónica de consumo e dominava as salas de estar dos consumidores. Mais: tal como a Apple hoje, já houve uma altura em que a Sony podia dar-se ao luxo de cobrar mais pelos seus produtos. O consumidor não se importava em pagar premium para ter Sony em casa, porque Sony era bom e recomendava-se.
O que aconteceu?
Os repórteres Bryan Gruley e Cliff Edwards da Bloomberg News redigiram um artigo com entrevista ao CEO da Sony, Howard Stringer, sobre os últimos anos da Sony no mercado que ilustra com clareza os desafios que a empresa tem vindo a enfrentar – desde tsunamis e incêndios à Apple e Samsung.
Alguns excertos (em inglês):
«Sony has lost nearly $8.5 billion on TVs over eight years and expects to keep losing at least into 2013. Samsung, Vizio, and other upstarts have driven prices so low that one Sony executive says the company charges less for some TVs than it cost to ship them a few years ago.»
«The company behaved as if its past superiority could never be challenged. So it clung to its Trinitron cathode-ray-tube TVs when Sharp, Samsung, and others were making flat screens the new industry standard in the early 2000s. Sony eventually responded, but today Samsung and LG both sell more TVs than Sony worldwide.»
«(…) the company yawned when Nintendo came out with its motion-sensing Wii game in 2006. Bloomberg News later quoted Stringer as saying he saw it as a “niche game device” but not as a competitor. The Wii became a smash hit and remains the best-selling game console today. The PlayStation 3 is third.»
«In his biography of Jobs, Walter Isaacson writes that Sony had “all of the assets,” including a record company, to create its own iPod. “Why did it fail?” he writes. “Partly because it was a company … organized into divisions (that word itself was ominous) with their own bottom lines; the goal of achieving synergy in such companies by prodding the divisions to work together was usually elusive.”»
Podem ler o artigo completo aqui.
Fonte: Bloomberg Businessweek
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