Steve Jobs gives tribute to one of his inspirations, Sony co-founder Akio Morita, during an Apple Special Event in Cupertino, California 05 October, 1999. Photo by JOHN G. MABANGLO / AFP via Getty Images.
AFP via Getty Images
The 21st Century has been hard on Sony. One reason, maybe the biggest, is Apple.
Sony today bears little resemblance to the electronics powerhouse that once made the Walkman and other household-name products. Over the past two decades, the company has undergone a difficult transformation, moving toward entertainment, technology and intellectual property with mixed results.
Sony grappled over time with the brutal economics of consumer electronics and shifted its focus to areas where it could have a stronger competitive advantage. Games and image sensors became important pillars, while Sony made strategic investments in music, movies and other content.
It was not an overnight success. For example, After Sony bought Columbia Pictures in 1989 for roughly $5 billion including debt, the studio struggled badly, and Sony wrote off most of its investment within several years. (Columbia Pictures is now part of Sony Pictures Entertainment, which ranked fourth among the major studios by U.S. box-office market share in 2025.)
The hugely popular Home Video Game console, PlayStation, arrived in 1994 and was actually a “game changer” for Sony. Steve Jobs, however, would soon introduce his own ultimate game changer that no one saw coming.
Jobs kicked open the door and framed the future with the iPod 25 years ago in 2001. “It holds a thousand songs and it goes right here in my pocket,” he said during a small Apple Music Special Event in Cupertino, California. In that moment, Apple quickly began to overshadow Sony’s iconic Walkman as the biggest brand in portable music and entertainment. Ironically, Steve Jobs thought the world of Sony and its visionary co-founder, Akio Morita, who introduced the Walkman.
According to ObsoleteSony, “Jobs didn’t just admire Sony’s products. He absorbed the cultural DNA behind them and reinterpreted it through a Western lens.” Jobs “channeled Akio’s lessons: simplicity, craft, collaboration. The iPod, born from his Walkman obsession, toppled Sony’s digital music dreams, a poetic twist.”
In January 2007, during a keynote at Apple’s Mac World Conference in San Francisco, Jobs said famously, “Today we’re gonna make some history.” And so he did after announcing the iPhone.
Walter Isaacson, in his bestselling biography of Jobs, outlines how he revolutionized “six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing and digital publishing.”
In that same period of time, Sony Music had a tremendous roster of recording artists from Bruce Springsteen to Bob Dylan and Beyoncé. I was lucky to be president and CEO of Sony Music Entertainment during that period, and there was no competing with the captivating genius of Jobs and Apple. Jobs’ personal motto, as stated in his famous 2005 commencement speech at Stanford, was “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” Culturally, that was a struggle for Sony. And, in the words often attributed to Peter Drucker, considered the inventor of modern management: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
As Isaacson also pointed out, there was “something Sony couldn’t do, ‘cause it made a lot of devices, but it didn’t really make software operating systems.” The revolution was well underway. Isaacson continued, Apple did it by “standing at the crossroads of… combining leaps of imagination with feats of engineering to produce new devices that consumers hadn’t even thought of.”
Hiroki Totoki, Sony’s current president and CEO, has worked for the company since 1987 and knows well the role the Walkman played in making Sony a household name. It’s no longer a consumer electronics company.
Sony has tried to turn its greatest assets–games, music, movies, television, anime and technology–into something more powerful than the sum of their parts. Increasingly, Sony is connecting those assets, adapting games into movies and television, expanding anime across its businesses and extending its intellectual property. “That’s the flywheel we like to make,” said Totoki.
The strategy may be Sony’s best chance to stay competitive. The question is whether Sony can turn its collection of businesses into a powerful ecosystem, or whether they will remain largely separate pieces of a sprawling conglomerate.
Can the company that once inspired Steve Jobs reinvent itself again and become capable of setting the agenda rather than reacting to the companies that do?
Bottom line: Sony still has a steep hill to climb. Its market valuation is $131 billion – $142 billion, and Apple’s is $4.5 trillion – $4.99 trillion.
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