The View from 1982
The oddest things sometimes turn up unexpectedly. Some time
ago, while I was looking for something else, I came across a 1982 edition of Playboy
magazine that I had kept because it had an in-depth interview with the late Akio Morita,
co-founder of Sony and godfather of most of its most notable products.
Morita was arguably the only Japanese executive most
westerners had ever heard of. The heads of other Japanese corporations tend to be
anonymous company men, but Morita enjoyed being in the spotlight. A true jet-setter, he
divided his time between Tokyo and New York for many years, and travelled constantly,
promoting Sony and its products.
As it happens, I met Morita on a visit to Sony in Tokyo at
just about the time this interview appeared, and I was impressed at how
"western" he was with a bunch of North American and European journalists. One of
his employees told me that Morita was really two personalities: when speaking English --
with which he was totally at home -- he had a casual, effusive air and an active humorous
streak, while in Japanese he was much more the formal corporate leader.
The occasion for the interview was his desire to counter a
rising tide of Japan-bashing that was going on in the early '80s, especially in the United
States. The year that the article appeared was one of recession, and there was a
perception that Japanese companies had worsened things by decimating the American auto
industry and all but annihilating the consumer electronics manufacturing business in the
U.S. As the most articulate of Japan's business leaders, it fell to Morita to counter
these notions.
Whether he did so or not is probably open to question. His
main point was that the Japanese companies had done their homework and were more adept
than their American or European counterparts in identifying and gratifying consumer
desires. In the process, he took a few swipes at western quality control and
labor/business relationships. It all makes for ironic reading today, when Japan is still
reeling from its worst recession in half a century and the west is going through the tail
end of an unprecedented boom.
Whatever his merits as a business analyst, there is no
doubt that Morita, who died in 1999 at 78, was a visionary when it came to consumer
electronics products.
Sony was started shortly after World War II by Morita and
his partner Masaru Ibuka, and both were active in the development of the company's early
products, such as the home tape recorder, the transistor radio, and the single-gun
Trinitron television. Ibuka was quite a bit older than Morita, however, and by the
company's glory days took only a limited part in its affairs. Things like the Walkman and
the Betamax VCR were definitely Morita's show.
In the interview, he relates the opposition he faced from
his own management on the prospects of the Walkman. He said, "a lot of our
salespeople said a small machine like that would not sell -- especially since it had no
recording capability. But I had a hunch it would sell. . . . So I said that if we
didn't sell 100,000 sets by the end of the year, I would give up my chairmanship of
Sony." He admitted that he was bluffing, but that by the time of the interview, three
years after Walkman's launch, they had moved 4,500,000 of the machines. And a recording
version was imminent.
What I found most fascinating about the interview, however,
was his insights about their current products and the ones that were about to be launched.
Maybe it's unfair to use the hindsight of two decades to judge the prescience of someone
who affected consumer electronics so profoundly, but it makes for interesting reading
nonetheless.
- Morita: "We have a new flat TV called the Watchman. It
is only one and a half inches thick so you can carry it around in your pocket. . . . The
electron gun is beneath, not behind, the screen and we were able to bend the
electron beam. This is the first step toward a true full-sized flat TV." Whether or
not this was ever produced, I can't recall, but we had to wait years before the LCD made
flat TV a reality.
- Morita: "Next year we will begin marketing the Video
Movie. This is a videotape recorder built right into a camera hardly bigger than today's
eight-millimeter movie cameras. The picture and sound are recorded on a quarter-inch
videotape cassette inside the camera. You can play it back without removing it from the
camera by attaching it to your television set." Camcorders did arrive a year or so
later, but the first ones used full-sized tape and were quite heavy and awkward. It took
another couple of years before 8mm and VHS-C allowed the size to be reduced.
- Morita: "We will soon introduce the world's first
digital audio-disc system. We call this a D.A.D., or "compact" disc. It will
reduce the size of a record to a 4.7-inch disc that you can put in your coat pocket, and
it has 60 minutes of music on each side. . . . We developed it with N.V. Philips of the
Netherlands." It's odd that Morita, a trained engineer, got the technical details
wrong, especially as their first player hit the shelves about the same time as the
interview. Also, it's strange that he was vague about the disc's name, as Philips had been
using the term Compact Disc and the logo that still graces the discs, since the first
prototype was shown in 1978.
But he was right about the Americans' lack of enthusiasm
for this Dutch-Japanese innovation. "We are offering licenses to anybody who wants to
produce the digital audio-disc system. . . . So far 24 Japanese hardware and five software
companies have signed up, plus five Korean; also eight European hardware and two software.
But the U.S.? Zero."
Things, fortunately, have changed.
...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com
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