A History of Sony   

The Sony Corporation is a Japanese company famous for it's consumer electronics product line. The corporation comprises of more than a hundred companies worldwide which include Sony Inc., Sony Online Entertainment, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Sony Music Entertainment. Sony Corporation is simply called Sony.

Sony was founded shortly after World War II by Masaru Ibuka, a defence contractor, and Akio Morita, a former naval lieutenant and physicist on May 7, 1946. The two men formed a joint venture to establish a company called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo or TTK with $500 as start-up capital. Ibuka and Morita chose a place in southern Tokyo to start their operation and after a while they were able to build their first product – a rice cooker. However, their first product did not perform well and failed to capture the market.

Not to be discouraged by this failure, the two men discontinued making home appliances and concentrated their efforts in developing electronic products. By this time the Japanese economy was growing stronger, and demand for electronic goods were steadily increasing. Ibuka, after seeing an American tape recorder at the Japan Broadcasting Corporation built his own version of a tape recorder. Their tape recorder was not selling well at the start until Ibuka came across a pamphlet from the U.S. military entitled 'Nine Hundred and Ninety Nine Uses of the Tape Recorder'. They had the pamphlet translated into Japanese to be used for marketing the product. This approach proved to be very effective and as a result their sales increased so dramatically that they were soon obliged to move to a bigger facility in Shinagawa.

In 1952, Ibuka heard of a new technology called a transistor which was developed by Bell Labs as a replacement to the larger vacuum tubes. Ibuka had an idea to develop compact radios using these tiny transistors. So, he obtained a patent license from Western Electric which cost TTK $25,000. In 1954, TTK started producing transistor radios in huge quantities and they named them Sony, from the Latin word sonus which means sound. The company experienced unprecedented sales not just in Japan but all over the world.

Sony continued to develop and release new products with the transistor as their foundation. In 1968, Sony engineers produced the Sony Trinitron, a colour TV that was able to project a clearer picture by using an electron gun for better beam alignment. The Trinitron gave a further boost to Sony’s sales and to maximize it's potential they invested heavily in it.

In 1971, Sony launched its video-cassette recorder or VCR. It was designed to cater for organisations involved in the communication and entertainment industry. The consumer version of the VCR was introduced into the market four years after and it was called the Betamax.

We all know what happened to Betamax! However, Sony continued to produce innovative products and in 1979 they were able to launch the Walkman. That really was something special. Among the other important products produced by Sony were the 3.5 inch floppy diskette in 1989, the world’s first CD player in 1982, a portable TV in 1992 and the Sony Playstation in 1994.

Sony is a global company that continues to develop and produce technological products for the consumers to enjoy in the future. We're not quite the company that Sony is! And we can't even repair their products when they go wrong! Unless it's PlayStation. We repair playstations in London.

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