One of Sony’s greatest strengths is their ability to produce innovative, quality products. Sony’s web page states “Sony innovations have become part of mainstream culture, including: the first magnetic tape and tape recorder in 1950; the transistor radio in 1955; the world’s first all-transistor TV set in 1960; the world’s first color video cassette recorder in 1971; the Walkman personal stereo in 1979; the Compact Disc (CD) in 1982; the first 8mm camcorder in 1985; the Minidisk (MD) player in 1992; the PlayStation game system in 1995; Digital Mavica camera in 1997; Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) player in 1998; and the Network Walkman digital music player in 1999” (Sony.com/en/corporate).
PC World published The 20 Most Innovative Products for the Year 2006. Sony’s Reader was listed as number six and Sony’s PlayStation was listed as number sixteen. Sony Corporation has managed to be competitive and stay a powerful organization by learning from past failures. Sony states the following: “Sony has learnt much from previous unsuccessful products. The Sony MSX home computer, for example, did not attain a satisfactory level of success. But it did teach Sony development engineers valuable know-how that would be applied in later years. In effect, these engineers became living resources, representing latent power within Sony that did not exist in other AV companies” (Sony.net).
Another strength of Sony is their ability to be successful in several different markets. They have made an impact in the video game market, the PC market, and especially the television market and there are still numerous