Great Forbes article about Sony

[Maximus]

http://www.forbes.com/technology/for.../0811/096.html

Paramount announced last August that it was choosing the Toshiba technology over Blu-ray. Reports flew that Toshiba paid Paramount and its DreamWorks unit $150 million to clinch the deal, which Paramount parent Viacom doesn't deny. Toshiba began selling HD-DVD players for $99, hoping to outsell Blu-ray players and lock in its advantage. The news triggered "sheer and utter panic" at Sony, says its U.S. chief financial officer, Robert S. Wiesenthal. Except in Tokyo. In Japan Blu-ray accounted for 90% of videodisc players sold, so to Sony executives there it seemed that Blu-ray had already won the format war. But Sony's U.S. executives knew that the huge U.S. market was now up for grabs.

In Tokyo the night the Paramount news broke, Stringer set up a global conference call to brainstorm ideas for stopping Toshiba. He called on every division to play a part, seizing on the crisis to force the company to work together. A company changes its entrenched habits only when it is under stress. So says Gerstner, in Chapter Seven.

One suggestion was quickly implemented. Sony had wanted gamers to use PlayStation as a videodisc player more often. So if they found a Hollywood movie in the box when they bought the machine, they'd likely test-drive the film, not just play the car-racing games. "Howard rang me up and told me, 'I really need you to pack half a million units of Spider-Man with PlayStation 3,'" says Michael Lynton, chief executive of Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Read the whole article, it doesn't tell the whole story, especially the part about retailers, but it gives a good account of what happened.

Generally speaking this is definitely one of the better articles about Sony I have seen recently.