The quote, from Italy’s Il Sole 24 Ore, is a sort of sad double entendre: The question is set up as a broad query about the state of the consumer electronics industry, but Stringer’s answer sounds more like an off-record confession about his own company than a cool assessment of its industry. From Sony’s point of view, the CE industry hasn’t started to turn around; from Sony’s point of view, Sony hasn’t started to turn around: whichever was meant, these aren’t the most reassuring words to hear from the head honcho of one of the largest electronics companies in the world.

Anyway, cheer up Howard! People will buy your consoles to play games and sim-kill civilian hostages for Christmas! It’s how things are. [Reuters via Digital Daily]

Sony Ericsson has taken leadership in the music phones and the camera phones with the Cybershot and the Walkman, but there are some weaknesses in the smart phone segment and we need to restore that

To translate: Sony Ericsson has spent the last five years desperately striving to dominate a segment of mobile phones — dumbphones — that nobody really cares about that much, and that reasonably-priced smartphones made obsolete in an instant. Congratulations in figuring out this painfully obvious thing, large company! Now hurry up with that Rachael. [WSJ]

Laptop Mag points to this interview that shows that indeed, different divisions are merging and acknowledging each other’s presence. VAIO is now under the PlayStation, Walkman and Reader group. VAIO notebooks are going to use PSN for movies and TV shows. Which is a step in the right direction, but turning a ship this size is like a group of ants trying to move a dumpster. [Laptop Mag]

Steve Jobs

Now: Just returning to daily work at Apple after a prolonged health scare, he’s still one of the most powerful—and recognizable—names in the industry.

Then: This was the year Steve started work on the Lisa, but also the year he became kind of a square. This happened in stages: he bought his first house; began his lifelong Mercedes habit; trimmed his hippie mop; bought some suits; and became a father—at least as far as the courts were concerned—to his daughter, Lisa Nicole. Sellout. [Source]

Now: Having stepped back from a day-to-day role at Microsoft, Bill now dedicates most of his time to his giant philanthropic foundation. For many, he’s still the voice of Microsoft—a perception he seems to appreciate.

Then: Still in his mid 20s, Bill Gates the businessman was busy rebranding his company from Micro-Soft to Microsoft, and moving operations from Albuquerque to the state of Washington, where they would stay from there on out. Bill Gates the nerd, on the other hand, was solving the so-called “Pancake Problem,” publishing a paper on it—his only academic work. Apparently, n being the number of pancakes in a stack, (5n + 5)/3 flips will always be enough to sort them into a desired order. Why? I have no idea, but it’s probably got something to do with me not being a genius billionaire. [Science News]

Now: Sometimes he’s Segging, sometime’s he’s dancing, sometimes he’s even Giz-ing. In any case since distancing himself from Apple, he’s been doing whatever the hell he wants.

Then: He had begun work on the Lisa, which would later be passed to other engineers. But outside of work, he was diversifying his portfolio. Before he was a voluntary spokesperson for Dean Kamen’s Segway, he was a paid spokesperson for Datsun, featuring in a TV commercial for the 1979 280zx in which he drops such memorable elocutions as “I prefer the Z!” and “IT. IS. AWESOME.” It is, Steve. It is.

Now: At Microsoft, he’s the dude. He basically runs the show, filling Billy G’s old shoes, as it were. In any case, he’s at his peak.

Then: Fresh out of college, Steve hadn’t even joined Microsoft yet. It wasn’t until 1980 that he even pitched the company, who later gave him a job, then a few more jobs, then THE job. A distinguished student at Harvard, he had lofty dreams, which led him to LA, where he tried to make it in Hollywood. (Behind the scenes, of course.) His bid for fame, or at least, profit made from others’ fame, didn’t pan out, so he went back to school at Stanford. In an alternate universe, Ari Gold’s character in Entourage is based on Steve. [Seattle Times]

Now: Michael Dell helms the second largest PC manufacturer in the world, and is currently trying to navigate a difficult economy and a precipitous drop in some of his core businesses.

Then: Baby Dell has was just getting a taste of his two lifelong passions: computing and cash. He got his first machine, an Apple II of all things, in 1979 at the age of 14, and promptly tore it apart. Soon after, he tried his hand at entrepreneurship, hawking newspaper subscriptions to newlyweds, whose information he scrounged from public records. This quickly made him a thousandaire. [Source]

Now: Currently serving as the Emperor of all things Sony, Stringer is hoping to overhaul the company’s lumbering, inefficient structure into something a little more streamlined, a little more manageable, and a lot more profitable.

Then: Our Howard, not yet a Sir, was killing network news. In 1979 he was working for CBS, and in 1980 presided over wide staff cuts at the network, mainly in the news department. Apparently, this gutted the network, dragging it down in the ratings races to this day. Not an auspicious start as far as restructurings go, but Sony’s a totally different animal, I guess. Right? [NYT]

Now: Passed away, so R.I.P.. But, when they were less dead, they founded what would become the largest PC manufacturer in the world, and drove innovation in personal computing, printing and computer science for years.

Then: As loads of exciting innovations were swirling around them, courtesy of people who were more or less children, Bill and David were in the twilight of their respective careers. David had returned to HP after a stint in Richard Nixon’s defence Department, where he became an expert in weapons procurement. Half-employed by HP and still advising the government from time to time, he could be seen wandering the halls of the company, doing odd jobs and making new employees kind of sad. By this time, Bill Hewlett had stepped down as CEO, though he and David still featured in some seriously rad company literature from time to time. [HP, Ralph Sanders, Image from BusinessWeek]

Now: Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin and Larry Page run the internet, to put it bluntly. Google’s got the most popular search engine, a wide range of successful web services, and a lion’s share of the online advertising market. They might have even made the OS on your phone.

Then: This is where Silicon Valley exec age disparities start to get funny. In 1979, Eric Schmidt was on his way to becoming a respectable adult, heading into a PhD program at Berkeley. Meanwhile, Sergey was emigrating from the Soviet Union. With his parents, of course, since he was only six. While Schmidt was churning out a dissertation over in Oakland, Sergey and Larry were building block castles at Montessori schools. Tech-savvy PhD candidates take note: Those kids at the Waldorf Academy down the street? They might be your bosses someday. I mean, don’t worry, you’ll be filthy rich. But still. [NNDB, The JC]

Now: Though he hasn’t birthed truly high profile invention since the Segway, Kamen is still doing some really cool stuff, be it designing water purification systems, bionic arms for vets, or rock-climbing wheelchairs. Or hanging out on his own private island.

Then: In 1979, Dean was running from the tax man! Sort of. Having failed to graduate from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Dean had jumped headfirst into a new project called the “Auto-Syringe,” which would later be known as the first insulin pump. After his project gained traction, he moved from Massachusetts to New Hampshire for tax reasons, and promptly got rich. [Wired]

Gizmodo ‘79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analogue age gave way to the digital, and most of our favourite toys were just being born.

Asked about Activision President and CEO Bobby Kotick’s threat to stop supporting the PS3 on account of prohibitively expensive licensing and development fees, Howard Stringer was a little bit indignant, frankly describing Kotick’s move for what it was:

He likes to make a lot of noise. He’s putting pressure on me and I’m putting pressure on him. That’s the nature of business.

So instead of engaging with Kotick—who to be fair, threatened Sony—Sir Howard just decided to let us all know that he’s kinda annoyed, OK?

When pushed about the “logic” of cutting the various costs of owning and developing for the PS3, Stringer wasn’t much more patient:

I (would) lose money on every PlayStation I make – how’s that for logic.

I mean, he’s right, but he also sounds stumped. Could this little tussle blossom into a beautiful corporate executive mudwrestling match? Only time will tell. [Reuters via Kotaku]

The buzz around Stringer’s ascension has always been that he would bring an assertive, brasher management style to the company, which would allow him to enact the sweeping reforms the company needs. The problem is, his new ideas often fall on deaf ears, and he’s finding getting anything done plainly difficult. The piece is a great read on the whole, but doesn’t see a clear way forward for Stringer, or Sony. Hence, this sad passage:

The real test of Stringer’s game plan is a product that doesn’t even exist yet, isn’t a machine, and has no code name. It is a kind of omnibus web-based software platform that will use the power of the Internet to connect the company’s rich library of content and devices, creating a multimedia experience for customers that actually rewards them for buying multiple Sony products and services.

In other words, Sony need to become Google and Apple, all at once, in about a year. Good luck, Howie! [Fortune via Chris Anderson]

There’d been rumours of a drastic shakeup at Sony involving the slaying of “sacred cows.” This is likely it, since Sir Howard wants to drag Sony out of slavish, single-minded production of hardware into a more unified direction that’s focused on software and connectivity, where Sony’s always been, to put it lightly, shitty.

So having two overarching groups—a consumer products one that does TVs, cameras, that kind of thing and a networked division that oversees PlayStation, Walkman and Vaio is good for two major reasons. One, it makes it more likely that the software focus will evolve and that gear will legitimately work together in satisfying ways (necessary, because what makes Sony’s products suck when they do is rarely the hardware, it’s the software, and their ecosystem is cluttered, schizophrenic mess). Two, they’ll put out less crap and maybe focus more on a few really good things. There were 18 camcorders at CES. Eight. Teen. Camcorders.

Focusing on making fewer products, ones that work together with great software, is how Sony will be great again. Godspeed, Sir Howard. [Hat tip to Bits]

Sir Howard—who Wilson presciently anointed as one of the next Gadget Gods last month—has lived near the top of the company for almost five years now, but has had limited success in his efforts to simplify the anatomy of the company. His replacement of Ryoji Chubachi as President comes soon after Sony’s comically abysmal fourth quarter earnings announcement, and has been interpreted as a sign that Sony is really, seriously trying to change.

The NYT reports that Sony is planning to “reorganise its electronics and games divisions to better integrate the company’s sprawling business” and has appointed the former CEO of their games unit to head up the effort. Obviously this would mean some serious internal reshuffling for Sony, but as far as consumers are concerned, it could also lead to some drastic changes in Sony’s convoluted product lines. [NYT]

Japan’s Nikkei and Reuters are both reporting that losses for the fiscal year ending in March could hit $US1.1 billion, with Nikkei saying they may even drift closer to $US2 billion. This is, as they say, the exact opposite of the $US2.2 billion profit forecast Sony previously cited.

At fault are, well, the financiapocalypse of course, which has resulted in subdued demand for HDTVs in the American market and elsewhere, as well as a booming yen that has driven up the price of exports. Stocks for all of the Japanese tech companies plunged today from the news, with Toshiba, Canon and Panasonic all down in the neighbourhood of 7%.

So the idea of Sony shuttering a major division by the end of next month rings a bit more true now, doesn’t it? Who will get the axe?

[NYT, Variety]