Word: ohga
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...president of Sony's U.S. subsidiary. A smart, capable 20-year company veteran with a Ph.D. in physics, Schulhof charmed his Japanese bosses with the nonconfrontational style to which they were accustomed. He was the only American to serve on the company's board. As a protege of both Ohga and Sony founder Akio Morita, he was given complete autonomy over the Hollywood operation even though he knew little about making movies...
...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...