Howard Stringer: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective CE Companies

Authored by Paul Sweeting on January 8, 2009 - 8:36am.

LAS VEGAS--The most compelling thing on display at Sony chairman Sir Howard Stringer's CES keynote this morning was a short clip from the upcoming Disney/Pixar movie "Up." Why was the chairman of Sony plugging a Disney picture? Because Sir Howard was borrowing Disney chief creative officer and Pixar founder John Lasseter to shill for Blu-ray, and where there's a quid there must be a quo. The fact that Sony is still dragging Hollywood luminaries up on stage to defend promote Blu-ray tells you all you need to know about where Sony really thinks about how the Blu-ray revolution is coming along (you WON for chrissakes). "Never have I been as excited by a technology as I am with Blu-ray," Lasseter enthused. "Once you have it, you can’t go back."

As for the rest of the generally news free event (unless you're hankering for an alarm clock that can tell you the weather from around the world), Stringer offered the following "Seven Imperatives" for consumer electronics companies (with Media Wonk's translation in parentheses):

Embrace the fusion of industries. (Yes, Apple is eating your lunch. Get used to it, and try to turn the tables.)
Adopt a service-enhanced philosophy. (We can't sell products anymore.)
Products must be multi-functional. (We can't sell products anymore.)
Support open technologies, because closed technologies are being disintermediated. (Never mind everything Sony has ever done up to this point.)
Advance the new shared experience by embracing social networking and connectivity (We can't sell products anymore.)
Create new value chains, such as HDTVs, which lead to Blu-ray purchases, which lead in turn to more movie purchases. (If only we could have had Blu-ray on the market in 2005, when people first started buying HDTV sets in mass.)
Go green. (It looks good in your corporate governance disclosures)

Also, Tom Hanks was very funny.

Paul Sweeting

Paul Sweeting is the Editor of Content Agenda, a business-to-business brand dedicated to the nexus of content, technology and business. This piece was originally published on Paul's blog "Media Wonk" on Content Agenda and is posted on DMW with the author's permission.

Image by CDernbach