As Sony hurtle towards financial oblivion, the quality of their products continues to disappoint.

[iagibso49]

It seems that as Sony hurtle towards financial oblivion, the quality of their products continues to disappoint. I have all Sony in my living room. I recently got a Samsung Smart TV for the bedroom. It's faster, more features, all the catch-up apps for every channel, better picture, clearer sound. And if a feature is advertised you can find it easily and quickly.

[rooobb]

Have a look at the Samsung community and you will see a lot of complains regarding quality, features not working, faulty panels...

There is no heaven anywhere where such electronic products have all pros and no cons IMHO

[Anonymous]

Hi iagibso49

Looking through some of your previous posts, it seems that you dont really have a nice thing to say about Sony products.  But yet you still keep coming back and purchasing them.  Your either a glutton for punishment or that they are not as bad as you claim !

I am 100% confident that Sony is not hurling towards financial oblivion.  The PS4 is even out-selling the Xbone in the US - which is quite an achievement I think, considering the support base of the xbox360 their. 

However I am assuming that you are referring to the announcements of the VAIO being sold off and job losses.  Unfortunately this is all quite normal and healthy for businesses.  All companies from time to time should be repositioning and restructureing themselves to what they think is best for revenue/sales and overall profits.  A prime example of a failure to restucture and not taking into account of your markets trend is Blockbuster.  They were in a prime position of knowing that physical sales/rentals were diminishing, yet clung on to a dying market.  I also hear even Samsung are considering getting out of the PC/Laptop side of things. 

Cheers

[iagibso49]

Selling off Vaio and immense job loses. Perfectly normal? No. Healthy? Certainly not. A sign of failure to adapt, innovate and maintain quality.

It is being recognised throughout the industry that, perhaps with the exception of PS4, Sony is struggling in a very unhealthy way. And even then, the lack of development in some areas of the PS4 is quite startling - for example, the voice recognition understands a handfull of words compared to the XBox where you can give it a full set of commands to control absolutely everything.

[Anonymous]

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@iagibso49 wrote:

Selling off Vaio and immense job loses. Perfectly normal? No. Healthy? Certainly not. A sign of failure to adapt, innovate and maintain quality.

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In economic terms it is normal and healthy to change ones products especially when dealing with the vast changes in consumer habits of electronics.  The last couple of years, we have seen a shift in consumerism away from traditional laptops and PC's towards mobile phones and tablets.  A few years ago, Sony werent even in the mobile phone game. 

Sony could have re-branded the VAIO laptops towards businesses, however there is already a few big players in the market (ie HP, DELL, Lenovo etc).  But at the end of the day world wide sales of PC's and laptops have been diminishing for the "home".  Why keep hold of a dying business model??  HMV, Jessops, Woolworths and Blockbuster certainly did - And look at the results.  Blockbuster knew the market trends towards "streaming" technologies and were in a prime position to rival Lovefilm right at its infancy.  You mention a "failure to adapt", what do you think Sony are doing?  Adapting to market trends thats all.

Sony TVs in recent years have been a loss making product.  But it is one of Sony's core products of which they are in the process of stategically turning this around.

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@iagibso49 wrote:

And even then, the lack of development in some areas of the PS4 is quite startling - for example, the voice recognition understands a handfull of words compared to the XBox where you can give it a full set of commands to control absolutely everything.

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Pure gimmick im afraid.

[iagibso49]

Consumers stick with quality products. When quality fails, brand loyalty disappears. Lenovo have had no trouble selling laptops in the current market. As can be seen from the forums here, there are some shocking stories of products which don't have some random fault, but obviously have some fundamental fault in the way they are manufactured and designed. The build quality and innovative quality of Sony products has been on a steady decline for the past 10 years.

$1.1 billion in losses this year

[Anonymous]

Lenovo's market share is primarily due to agressive acquisitions and take-overs.

• Lenovo acquired IBM's personal computer business in 2005
• On January 27, 2011, Lenovo formed a joint venture to produce personal computers with Japanese electronics firm NEC.
• In June 2011, Lenovo announced that it planned to acquire control of Medion, a German electronics manufacturing company.
• In September 2012, Lenovo agreed to acquire the Brazil-based electronics company Digibras, which sells products under the brand-name CCE
• In September 2012, Lenovo agreed to acquire the United States-based software company Stoneware, in its first software acquisition
• On 29 January 2014, Google announced it would sell Motorola Mobility to Lenovo for US$2.91 billion in a cash-and-stock deal.

Yet:

• Lenovo sold its smartphone and tablet division in 2008 for US$100 million in order to focus on personal computers and then paid US$200 million to buy it back in November 2009

The headline figure of $1.1 billion is simply that - A headline figure.  If you are interested, you need to fully analyse the financial postion of Sony.

http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/IR/financial/fr/13q3_sony.pdf

[iagibso49]

Exactly ... success all round for Lenovo.

Just look on here about stories of laptops falling apart. Just go to an SVF laptop and try the touchpad - absolutely attrocious; you can't control the mouse because of the shoddy device, and the mountain of complaints on Amazon. Screens becoming detached from the housing after only a few months use - read the reviews on Amazon. Remember, we're meant to be talking about a high-end product range here from a company which prided itself on longevity of products and build quality.

Sony are not meant to be the Primark of electronics, they are meant to be the exact opposite, yet Primark they've become.

Go into Richer Sounds. They don't recommend Sony amps any more, based purely on the quality of the sound - poor centre imaging and difficult to make out intelligable speech, and radical imbalance of some surround sound elements. And ... guess what ... you can hear it. You can use your ears and actually hear it.

Look at the TVs. Limping along trying to get the On Demand services together, while others have it in the bag. Switching from one 3D format to another, incredibly uncomfortable glasses, while other companies have much better image quality (Samsung, LG etc) and much lighter glasses from years back.

They will have $1.1 billion in losses, whatever way you try to dress it up or down.

And the list goes on.

[Anonymous]

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@iagibso49 wrote:

Exactly ... success all round for Lenovo.

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So your definining success based on aquisitions?  This means then that Sony are entirely successfull according to this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Sony_Corporation

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@iagibso49 wrote:

Exactly ... success all round for Lenovo.

Just look on here about stories of laptops falling apart. Just go to an SVF laptop and try the touchpad - absolutely attrocious; you can't control the mouse because of the shoddy device, and the mountain of complaints on Amazon. Screens becoming detached from the housing after only a few months use - read the reviews on Amazon. Remember, we're meant to be talking about a high-end product range here from a company which prided itself on longevity of products and build quality.

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Like with any product, there will always be a small percentage of failures.  I havnt had the priveledge of owning a Sony VAIO laptop.  Just to make you happy though - I have a Samsung   14 months down the track with it, it developed a fault with the right mouse button.  I havent fixed it yet, simply swapped the left and right buttons around (via software), so most of my right clicking is now on the left button.

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iagibso49 wrote:

Go into Richer Sounds. They don't recommend Sony amps any more, based purely on the quality of the sound - poor centre imaging and difficult to make out intelligable speech, and radical imbalance of some surround sound elements. And ... guess what ... you can hear it. You can use your ears and actually hear it.

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I cant comment on what Richer Sounds recommends, but I do know for a fact that the STR-DH820 (which I own), the STR-DH840 are truely excellent product for its price point.  The STR-DN1040 also gives great sound.

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@iagibso49 wrote:

Look at the TVs. Limping along trying to get the On Demand services together, while others have it in the bag. Switching from one 3D format to another, incredibly uncomfortable glasses, while other companies have much better image quality (Samsung, LG etc) and much lighter glasses from years back.

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3D is basically dead, which is unfortunate.  I do like 3D (but does give me headaches).  I do agree about the On Demand services.  This is where Sony could be a little more pro-active and aggressive.

In regards to image quality.  It is simply not true that Samsung/LG etc have better image quality.  Just having a browse via other forums such as the AV Forums and US's AVS Forums will give you that.  It is still widely portrayed in the industry that there are 3 tiers of TVs

Tier 1 = Sony and Panasonic

Tier 2 = Samsung, LG and Sharp

Tier 3 = Rebrands such as JVC, Bush and soon to be Pioneer.