Digital Home Thoughts: Gizmodo Looks At The History Of Sony's Founders

"To understand Sony, understand its founders, Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita. Even though both are now gone, their executive dynasty and its haphazard, emotional governance established the model for the Sony of today-even as it holds Sony back. Sony's early years are thick with stories of near disaster tempered by last-ditch recovery. After the Second World War, Japan was rebuilding its infrastructure. Electricity, no longer needed for military factories, was in surplus, and Ibuka and Morita wasted no time in putting together an electric rice cooker and an electric blanket for sale to the Japanese market."

This is quite a nice article from Gizmodo, giving a brief insight in to how Sony was formed, and how the people, their ideas and the technology they developed brought Sony on to the world stage. There is a particular sentence in the article which strikes a chord with me: "The first and primary motive for setting up this company was to create a stable work environment where engineers who had a deep and profound appreciation for technology could realize their societal mission and work to their heart's content.". I have seen this ideal in many of Sony's products over the years, technology that is fantastic and ground breaking, lovingly created by their engineers, and yet perhaps not ready for the real world or even what the public wants. One product which I bought in to which fits this scenario for me is the Sony Aibo. It was the first real home entertainment robot and I absolutely loved it, and still do. The Sony engineers created something which really was amazing at the time and must have cost millions in R&D, yet where is it now? Perhaps Sony is still run in the same way as it was founded after all, what do you think?