Unfortunately for them around the time of Netflix's ascent they were embroiled with all kinds of financial issues but still the mind boggles
I feel like some of those very diversified company tend to be the one who struggle to evolve and adapt because some part of their business are worried about being cannibalized by the new business opportunity (like how streaming “killed” physical media). I.e, if you are the director of the “DVD player division” you have an active interest in killing any potential streaming division. Reality is of course more complex than this, but this is the kind of story we sometimes hear off when "too big to fail" companies end up missing a major shift.
Funnily, Netflix is a common case study on how to transition past the dilemma.
I don't remember where I heard the original story, but this snippet from this article sums up why and how they deliberately cut the DVD team out of the company culture.
> “In periods of radical change in any industry, the legacy players generally have a challenge, which is they’re trying to protect their legacy businesses. We entered into a business in transition when we started mailing DVDs 25 years ago. We knew that physical media was not going to be the future. When I met Reed Hastings in 1999, he described the world we live in right now, which is almost all entertainment is going to come into the home on the internet. And he told me that at a time when literally no entertainment was coming into the home on the internet. And it really helped us navigate this transition from physical to digital, because we just didn’t spend any time trying to protect our DVD business. As it started to wane, we started to invest more and more in streaming. And we did that because we knew that that’s where the puck was going. At one point, our DVD business was driving all the profit of the business and a lot of the revenue, and we made a conscious decision to stop inviting the DVD employees to the company meeting. We were that rigid about where this thing was heading.”
https://colemaninsights.com/coleman-insights-blog/netflixs-s...
They still do all those things? And they're still successful in most of them? They haven't "failed" or "dropped the ball" based on any metric I can think of. I'm not sure what you're referring to here to be honest.
Sony just focus at their home market more
[1] If the Anime News Network finishes reviewing it doesn't make the cut
Companies didn't, leadership did. For a big, fat check. And they're happily retired now, sitting in their expensive villas with millions on their balance.
They couldn't care less about your happy childhood memories that the content produced by their predecessors engraved in your mind.
Really, it is probably an inevitable and somewhat healthy feature of life and the business cycle, but it is also baffling to witness.
When I was at Amazon, I came away feeling that the gap between retail and Amazon was too large and the disruption was warranted. But in the case of Sony, it feels they were so much closer to the space that it feels like a much bigger own goal...
Sony Rootkit, Sony BetaMax, Sony MiniDisc, Sony ATRAC, Sony Memory Stick [Select / PRO / Duo / PRO Duo / PRO-HG Duo / M2 / XC / PRO-HG Duo HX / WTF], Sony UMD, Sony Elcaset, Sony SDDS, Sony VAIO, Sony Walkman, Sony Discman, [...]
At least they had some lasting success with their Umatic video tape cartridge, and with the CD that they co-developed with Philips. Their Trinitron tubes were unique and generally quite good -- and they lasted as long in the market as any other CRT did, I suppose. And their various iterations of PlayStation console have all been popular despite being Sony products.
The answer to that one is simple: they were bad at software.
Apple and then Android killed the market for all those hardware devices and physical media.
My 65" Bravia is one of the best TV's in its class and runs Google TV (IMO a major leg up over the junky Tizen/WebOS offerings from competitors).
They make some of the best noise cancelling headphones money can buy. They have the PS5 and own a bunch of game studios to provide exclusive content for it.
They're doing just fine!
Maybe it's better now, but looking at the PS3-era PSN, that expertise had negative value.
Not recurring revenue but they have their thing set up
They didn't fumble around as much, also Sony still has leverage a lot on Japan Industry
I think what history shows us is that the modern monopolies managed to destroy antitrust to the point where nobody will ever do to them what they did to others.
Is that a financialised version of piggybacking?
Netflix got it's start shipping CDs, which was only possible due to the first-sale doctrine. The rights landscape hasn't adjusted for the new technologies. How could an new player disrupt a streaming world when everything is so locked down?
and neither do consumers. video over the internet is the future that Netflix saw 20 years ago, when others didn't, except YouTube.
I buy vinyl but mostly listen to music on Tidal. People buy cassettes and CDs, but that’s, for all intents and purposes, a dead business.
The physical medium is not the content.