When it comes to the technology industry, Sony has always moved with the times and is often one step ahead of other companies. Since its founding, the company has always financed and developed new technologies, pushing the entertainment industry further than most other companies ever have. For this reason it has been targeted and fought against other companies that aim to carve up a part of the entertainment market. Sony poses a threat to all other entertainment companies, and more recently has been attacked by Microsoft (because of their x-box product) and their fans. From this competition, however, Sony has learned to adapt and often partner with, or sell to, Microsoft in many ways. With their PlayStation console, they often purchase the rights from companies to release the game only on their system. This innovative thinking makes more customers bound to purchase Play Station console, if they want to play new and popular games. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay In addition to console exclusives which, to generate large profits, also have an interesting business model, which they release and update, usually once a year. Currently, their business model involves reinvesting most of the money earned, to have a chance of making a much larger profit. The majority of Sony's profits have always come from music, but due to the rise of gaming, they have updated their plans to increase gaming profits by a large percentage; 300-500 million more per year. This is due to the use of the digital age, since not many people buy music anymore, choosing to use streaming services like Pandora or Spotify. Although music is one of the largest industries, with as many as 4.5-5 billion in sales per year, gaming profits are rapidly increasing to match these numbers. “Network and gaming services are Sony's main growth driver within our mid-range plan. In this segment, PS4 continues to perform well. The overall platform, including software and network services, is receiving widespread customer acclaim and has exceeded our initial expectations for revenue growth. As of May this year, PS4 has collectively sold more than 40 million units worldwide, continuing its rapid growth and expansion as the best-selling console in Play Station history” “Corporate Strategy Meeting - June 29, 2016” (sony.net) Sony is also very quick to pick up on popular trends, often being the buyer of the latest trending games in a specific genre or negotiating deals with fast-rising artists. When an artist is seen trending on music platforms like iTunes or Spotify, or in the industry in general, and is not signed to Sony, agents often try to negotiate a deal with them, in the hopes that they will work with Sony. . Not only do they do it often, but they do it well, signing hundreds, and hundreds of highly successful artists, through the way they track trends. Sony has undermined several major music industry companies by poaching their artists or getting them better deals before they signed up. It's not just the size of the company, but also the fact that their name is known for having great recording equipment technology for their artists that helps the company grow. In fact, Sony was one of the first companies to delve into digital audio production, in turn transforming it into the industry giant that it is. “Nakajima was oneone of the first to actually produce digital sound. He achieved this by sampling sound waves at defined intervals. Each sample was then converted into a binary number that could be recorded as a series of pulses on magnetic tape. This was the basic process used to digitize sound. At the time, no one could really see a future in Nakajima's large, expensive digital recorder, which reproduced static noise. ""Making Digital Audio a Reality" (sony.net). Noticing the trends in improving audio quality technologies, they rushed to develop their own, and it's one of the reasons we have music in digital format today. One thing they could learn using their company's stature to advance is that their status in image and image formats is declining. They are not known as people who produce cutting-edge, high-quality digital images. Although they have a stake in the film industry, they do not use what they learned there in terms of better getting products to the public. Their company's image solutions division is the lowest funded section and also the lowest in terms of reimbursement opportunities past history could make them a giant in graphics solutions, however with their recent plans to further reduce funding, that probably won't happen. As mentioned earlier in the document, Sony has captured a large market, ranging from video games, to music, to feature films. It handles them well, but has serious competition. One of its biggest and most recent failures in the technology sector is digital cameras and televisions. This year they reported a combined loss of a billion dollars, due to the failure of these product lines; resulting in the closure of three Sony factories, with more to be closed in the future. Being outpaced by its competitors like LG, they are diverting resources from the television and camera industry and perhaps may even stop developing and working on them in the near future. As more factories close, they said they will use the extra funds raised to help create a net profit on these TVs again; however, being so far behind in this market due to insufficient funding, it is unlikely that they will be able to catch up any time soon. "Sony, which makes Bravia flat-panel televisions and Cyber-shot digital cameras, joins a number of other major Japanese corporate names, including Toyota Motor Corp. and Hitachi Ltd., which are announcing large losses. Sony will close three factories in Japan by the end of December: one for cell phone cameras, another for video recorder components and another for systems used for smart cards. After the closure, the number of Sony factories worldwide will decrease from 57 last year at 49”. “Sony reports annual loss of $1 billion; sees more red ink” (Yuri Kageyama). Microsoft and the PC market As the PC market has exploded in recent years, Sony has begun trying to mend relationships with other companies, even going so far as to announce that they are willing to share game servers with Microsoft. This would allow players on both consoles to play with each other; a smart move for Sony, but since Microsoft doesn't need extra profits, they didn't accept the deal. Cheaper computers with better graphics capabilities are being produced every day, and this significantly reduces their profits. Their ideal, and only, solution was to upgrade theirsPlay Station devices. By increasing the graphical output, game quality and launching more exclusives in the market, they are actively leveraging their product in the market. If you can't play a game you find exciting on any other console, you'll be forced to play on theirs. Sony has always been a global leader in technology. He was never the one to report the losses. Yet, due to these competitions in the market, they reported a loss of a billion; a first loss for Sony in over 14 years. Sony started its real debut with radios. Sony started as a small, struggling company with little profit and a small amount of products. When they introduced their “TR-63 Radio” to the US market, its popularity exploded, causing their products to soar from 100,000 to over five million units. This has led them to be known for quality products and audio; which the company is then fully built upon. They continued to challenge the capabilities of audio, making revolutionary changes, beating audio giant Dolby Digital, introducing 7.1 audio, instead of Dolby 5.1. “In 1993, Sony challenged the industry-standard Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound format with a newer, more advanced proprietary digital audio format called SDDS (Sony Dynamic Digital Sound). This format used eight channels (7.1) of audio compared to the six used in Dolby Digital 5.1 at the time. ““Audio Coding – Sony” (Wikipedia) Sony continued to do even bigger things, expanding into more and more useful technology niches. One of the most notable during their inception was that of the digital audio recorder. Sony had not only developed a way to convert older audio to digital format, but could now also record directly to clear-digital format. This gave them the competitive advantage they needed with the profits made from audio and the use of digital formatting , began to enter the electronics industry; creation of disk storage, flash memory, and optical storage. This blossomed into the Sony-branded products we know today such as Sony laptops, the Play Station entertainment system, and the ever-modern headphones. for virtual reality Play Station; which is currently expected to do very well in the virtual reality market. Their modern gaming console, the Play Station 3, used an advanced graphics card for its time, the Nvidia RSX. This card was made specifically for the console and is based on an existing PC graphics card, the Nvidia G70. Since its use, it has given the Play Station the power to increase its popularity in the gaming market. Yet, one of the most amazing things about it, they managed to figure out how to run games very well, with just 256MB of RAM; To put that into perspective, Windows 95 could use up to 2 gigabytes of RAM. It used virtual memory to swap data, so the load wasn't all on ram, making it efficient with its ram; the system is able to run more with less RAM, saving the company money. On top of that they managed to fit a quad-core CPU inside the console, essentially unheard of for the time of release. Now, their newest console, the PS4, has 8GB of RAM, more than many PCs today. This only further increases its popularity, proving that Sony knows how to use innovative technologies; meaning other companies must follow their lead or be left behind. By building a SWOT analysis, we can really see how the company sees itself and how it works to run smoothly. For example, some of its obvious strengths are: the use of.