Sony Admits Mistakes Were Made With Product Offerings

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Sony hired “Chief Transformation Officer” George Bailey away from IBM last year to help reform the tech giant and help them get back on top of the consumer electronics market where they once reigned king. Responding to criticism of Sony, Mr. Bailey gave an interview with website Gizmodo where he spoke candidly about Sony and other players in the tech space.

On Sony’s latest product offerings, Bailey admitted that Sony wasn’t as consumer friendly as they once were. “It’s clear that some of the things that delighted the engineers in Tokyo were not the things that delighted consumers in San Francisco, New York, or Brisbane.” he says in the interview. Bailey went on to say that Sony has lost sight of consumers and focused too much on engineering achievements – but they hope to get back on track.

Bailey said such changes don’t happen overnight. “We’ve actually been working on it for a year. Last April we complete restructured the company. We’ve got 170,000 people around the world. This is a big company—$80 billion revenue,” he says.

He says that despite Sony’s wide reach in almost every segment of consumer electronics, and some outside of consumer electronics (Sony’s music label and film publishing division) they often haven’t worked together. He says in the future Sony will be working together to develop some interesting products – possibly like the Qrocity VOD service which will be on all Sony products that use the XMB UI.

Bailey said that Sony was “all about” the Sony Ericsson partnership and put to bed rumors that Sony would sell or close their shares in SE. Bailey says he has been using the new Xperia X10 personally and thinks it’ll be a big hit. Bailey says, “That smartphone is Android-based. I’ve played with it and I think it’s as-good or better as iPhone or Blackberry. [...] But I think a lot of people who are used to the Apple and BlackBerry experience will find this Android-based smartphone to be very, very attractive.”

On Apple, Bailey said that he admires the hype and focus that Apple can get on their products. He cited that despite all the hype over the iPad – Apple only comes out with a new device every few years (not including refreshes of iPods or computers), whereas Sony will come out with ten or twelve new HDTVs, computers, mobile phones, whatever, in a year and will get little attention from the public.

Bailey says we can expect a lot more focus on individual SKUs and products from Sony, but he warns:

We are never going to be as narrow as Apple. We don’t want to be that way. We want to offer more choices and a bigger range. But I do think we have erred on the side of being a little bit too diverse and we are going to be focusing more and more as we go forward.