Sony – All the stops

Sony is making the right moves to become a proper ecosystem.

• It’s a long shot for Sony to become one of the major ecosystems but it is doing everything it can to make it happen.
• Sony actually has a better chance than a number of competitors due to the assets that the company has had lying around inside its organisation for years.
• Sony has suffered from the same problem as Microsoft and many others where different parts of the same company are often ignorant of one another and do not cooperate.
• I think that Hirai-san understands this problem and knows that he must break it down if Son y is to have a chance at success.
• The latest iteration of this is to use its own Sony Pictures Television studio to create exclusive content that will be sold through the PS4.
• Microsoft is trying this with a TV series based on its Halo game as is Amazon but Sony is the one that has the best chance of making this stick due to its in house expertise.
• The first step in Sony’s recovery is to get all of the Sony assets pulling together and then to look at covering the rest of the Digital Life pie.
• With gaming and media, Sony has 40% of Digital Life covered but is missing many of the other important activities like social networking, messaging and browsing.
• The key to success of the first stage will be the quality of the exclusive content.
• If Sony can repeat what Netflix has achieved with House of Cards then the PlayStation platform may get a lot stickier but that’s a big if.
• Sony remains the only Japanese company that has a hope of a long term future in consumer electronics and it is encouraging to see it trying to finally make the most of what it has.
• I am not getting excited about the prospects for the stock yet, but in the ecosystem race I would rank it above Amazon and Blackberry in terms of prospects to make a proper go of it.