Sony’s New CEO Plots A Path Out Of Failure

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published

Sony’s (NYSE: SNE) new CEO Kazuo Hirai says the way for the company to turn around is to use the successful Playstation model. The PS3 is a gaming console, internet device, and entertainment platform. It can play high definition DVDs, stream content over the internet, work as a platform for game software and as a global communications device. How hard can it be to make Sony’s cameras, PCs, and TVs to do the same? He can ask all of the companies that have tried to compete with the Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) “ecosystem” of hardware, apps, and the iTunes store.

Saying that he will make hard decisions about the firm’s business model, Hirai remarked

“It starts with great hardware but that’s not the entire equation. It’s got to be combined with software, content, services. That’s the whole combination that we need to bring our customers.”

As usual, the hard decisions will include ones that all new CEOs at troubled companies make. He will fire a lot of people to reduce “redundancies”

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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