Word: norio
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Sony co-founder Akio Morita and then-president Norio Ohga knew in the 1980s that the digital revolution was coming. In fact, with Philips Electronics, Sony created the audio CD. They talked about the revolution. And they set their engineers to work on digital products: audio and video recorders, televisions and broadcasting equipment. Still, the company's great innovators were backwinded by their own ingenuity. In the late 1980s, when Japan was riding high, Morita, who co-authored a book titled The Japan That Can Say No, began to spend as much time criticizing American management practices...
...that Sony finally removed Schulhof, the architect of its Hollywood dreams and the only American ever to sit on its board. With Morita sidelined since his 1993 stroke and unable to protect him, and new president Nobuyuki Idei, 57, clearly ascendant, Schulhof, 53, resigned after conferring with Sony chairman Norio Ohga, his remaining Tokyo mentor. Ohga "felt he had no choice but to support Mr. Idei," Schulhof told Time in an interview. "Therefore I could not stay here...
Sony's Hollywood foray began, as so many sour business deals do, with bold rhetoric and grand strategies. Norio Ohga, the part-time symphony orchestra conductor who has been Sony's CEO since 1989, believed in a "synergy" between Sony's core business, producing "hardware" such as VCRS and camcorders, and Hollywood's "software" -- movies. Owning a studio, Sony thought, would help give the company the clout to set the industry standard for the next generation of digital video technology. In the early 1980s Sony's Betamax format of analog videotapes lost out to VHS, so Sony was determined...
...which begs the question: Who needs it? "We'd like to introduce the MD to the industry as a successor to cassettes," says Sony president Norio Ohga. That sounds a lot like what the company said only last fall as it introduced the digital audio-tape Walkman. But now Sony argues that there is room for both DAT, aimed at hi-fi fetishists, and MD, whose lower price, smaller size and ease of use should appeal to the masses. Provided, of course, the masses will pop for yet another audio device...