Sony Fires Back

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Tretton is stressing the importance of communicating accurate launch numbers, so I wonder aloud if the 400K thing is now a target rather than a deliverable. He replies, “It’s certainly the goal. We’re talking about daily production, right up until November 16. We’re not stamping out widgets here. It’s not possible to just say ‘how many did we build yesterday?  How many days are left?’ and just multiply accordingly.”

So you can forget about a nice image of a warehouse filling up with completed boxes of PS3s, heaving pallets multiplying across the floor in fast-forward time. Tretton says, “We’ve got very solid numbers on parts. It’s a matter of assembling those in time and getting them on a plane. I am very, very confident of the so-called launch window and getting the units out there, but I’m a firm believer in, until you do something, it’s just talk.”

On Blu-ray

As is well documented, one component in particular is causing the problem -  the Blu-ray laser diode. “I’m like everybody else. I’m saying ‘come on!  Just build ‘em, man!  What’s so complicated?’  But think about what that blue laser diode has to do. It has to read audio CDs, standard DVDs, Blu-ray DVDs,  PlayStation 1 games, PlayStation 2 games, and PlayStation 3 games. Six completely different formats that have nothing to do with each other and you’re going to have one device that’s going to read all those.  

“That’s a tremendous concept. But when you turn to the engineers and say ‘go build that for me,’ they ask ‘are you crazy?’ But they’ve managed to pull it off. We’ve got the blue laser diode’s yield now. Okay, it’s not necessarily where we’d like to be but it will get exponentially healthier as we go forward. The production capacity on November 6, is better than the production capacity on November 1 which was better than October 26. It gets better every day and as we get closer the numbers get bigger and better. It’s just a matter of physically getting them here.”

I ask if it’s possible that the numbers will be well shy; say as low as 100K. He says this won’t happen. “I don’t think that there’s any risk of us having 100,000 units out there day one. To me that would be disastrous because we just have too many doors to spread.”

On the media

We get onto the subject of Sony’s profile in the press these last few months, which have not been as positive as in years gone by. The firm’s public presentations have been hit and miss, while the launch, and Sony corporately, have seen troubles.

“We’ve had three very successful platform launches. We’ve dominated for well over a decade. It’s a fair question to ask ‘can Sony do it again?’ but I’d love to get a little bit more benefit of the doubt,” he says.

“Look, we understand that consumers won’t just line up blindly to buy our platform. We know that the competition won’t just lie down and die. But we feel pretty confident about our ability to execute. Right now we are in this frustrating period when it’s all speculation. I prefer to talk about the facts. I’m more comfortable talking about what is happening now, rather than what might happen in the future. Let’s get the battle on and see who the winner is and then talk about it.”

The media has undoubtedly been hooked on Sony’s travails this past year. Tretton sees this as symptomatic of our celebrity culture in which a company can be viewed in much the same way as a movie star or sports team.

“Bad news sells.  All the success that we’ve had is not a sexy story, but any missteps that we’ve had is a story.  Sony has gone from number four to number one in high definition television sets this year but people don’t want to write about that.  They want to write about a battery recall. Sony is number one at the [cinema] box office, but people just want to write about the costs of the PlayStation 3 production delay.”