Sony’s slide continues

And the company was a trailblazer, arguably inventing the consumer electronics 'genre'. Akio Morita, the company's cofounder, was named one of the 20 most influential people of the 20th Century. And no wonder: he not only created the products – at least the ideas for them – he also created the markets. From the early days developing tape recorders, through the mid 1950s, where he saw the potential of the recently developed transistor to enable portable radios – the ubiquitous transistor radio – to the 1970s, where he came up with the idea of the Walkman, and the Trinitron TV, Morita drove Sony to a dominant market position. He did lose the VCR war by continuing to back Betamax, but any losses were seriously outweighed by the successes. Ahead of the trend towards globalisation and non specific corporate names, Morita renamed his company as Sony, recognising the need for a snappier, more globally accessible, name than Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo. Sony was the first Japanese corporation to trade on Wall Street and the first to establish manufacturing operations local to the end user. Yet today's Sony is a much different company; one that, by all accounts, is in increasing difficulties, even bearing in mind its troubles of the last couple of years. It appears to be ditching its computing business, it has spun its TV operation into a standalone company and seems to be pinning its future on smartphones and games consoles. Where in the past, Sony created markets for products, today, it's only making products for saturated markets. Nokia found out the hard way that if you sit back and watch companies like Apple and Samsung blaze new trails, create new markets, then it's hard to recover. Sony, unfortunately, appears to be learning the same lesson.