WHAT WAS THE EFFECT OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT ON SONY’S MP3 PLAYER CRISIS?

Necip Fazıl Keskinkılıç

HISTORY OF MP3 INDUSTRY AND THE ROLE OF SONY

Before the iPod became ubiquitous, there was the “Walkman”. The portable cassette players, (small, personal and portable) introduced in 1979, sold 200 million units, rocked the recording industry and fundamentally changed how people experienced music.

In 1990s technology had changed and cassettes left its place to Compact Disc but Sony rapidly adapted itself to produce walkmans running with CD too. They call it “Discman”

In 1998 as the flash memory market started to warm up, Sony introduced Memory Stick and .

In 2001, IPods were announced and launched, it aggressively entered the music industry and there wasn’t any trend like putting cassettes or CD into the devices. With IPods, people explored to listen to music without CD and cassette this is where Sony frustrated by failure but biggest reason behind this failure is that; one of Sony’s biggest problems has long been its failure to make great software that runs its great-looking hardware.

In 2001, the digital music game changed, and Sony was no longer driving progress. As the world caught on to MP3s, Sony kept pushing its own format called ATRAC, and terrible software to manage your music library and devices

Discman to IPod

A decade later, the iPod’s scroll wheel UI, iconic design, fun name, and great ads get a lot of credit for its success. But I think the simple and free iTunes software was just as important: You could very easily rip CDs, organize MP3s, and sync them to an iPod. It was elegant enough for anyone to use, and Sony and everyone else didn’t really have anything like it.

WHAT WAS THE EFFECT OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT ON SONY’S MP3 PLAYER CRISIS

Explicit Knowledge

Tacit Knowledge

Sony is a company using explicit knowledge during the Walkman and Discman time so that many firms had copied Sony’s way of producing mp3 player

Management theorists suggest that; “tacit knowledge contributes to innovation”

COMBINATION - CONNECTING

Move from explicit to explicit

This transformation phase can be best supported by technology. Explicit knowledge can be easily captured and then distributed/transmitted to worldwide audience.

Sony’s problems go much deeper. Its troubled partnership with Ericsson set it back when the smartphone revolution was taking off. Its inability to collaborate between multiple divisions was a huge handicap.

Today, Sony seems to be increasingly leaning on Google to provide software.

APPLE VERSUS SONY: A VICTORY FOR COLLABORATION

1•Involve the process of sharing resources including ideas, know-

how, technologies, and staff between two or more different organizations in order to create a solution to a given problem

2 •Apple’s iPod and iPhone supported by the iTunes online music store became serious threat for Sony.

3 •The reason why Sony failed was that the organisational silos were too deep and entrenched

RECOMMENDATIONS

Create own software

Separated departments have to work in connection

Integrated work

Trend has to be followed regularly