Co-Founder of Sony Sparked a Revolution

More than any other individual, Akio Morita, the co-founder of Sony Corp. who died Sunday in Tokyo at age 78, stimulated Japan’s ascent to a global economic powerhouse built on technology. Sony’s products helped transform the world’s consumer culture, beginning a decade after World War II when most Americans had misguided and simplistic notions about the business capabilities of Japan.

“He was an engine that pulled the world economy as well as the Japanese economy,” Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi told the Japanese media Sunday.

The handsome, cosmopolitan Morita turned a radio repair shop started in the ashes of postwar Tokyo into a consumer-electronics titan. His company’s myriad inventions--from the home tape recorder to the compact disc and Playstation game console--forever changed how people view entertainment media.

In doing so, Sony almost single-handedly shifted the U.S. public’s view of the words “made in Japan” from a symbol of cheap trinkets to the imprimatur of high-quality consumer products. As the company helped rebuild Japan into the world’s second-largest economy, it led a trend of Japanese dominance in mass-market electronic entertainment devices that drove many large U.S. firms out of the market.

“Morita’s most important legacy was that he was the person who took electronics and made it fit into our lives,” said Paul Saffo, a director of the Institute for the Future, a Silicon Valley think tank. Sony’s goal, Saffo added, was “taming this technology to make our lives a little easier, a little better, a little more fun.”

Morita, son of a sake brewer, started his company with Masaru Ibuka in 1946, using a loan of $500. The radio repair business, then called Tokyo Tsushin Denki, almost immediately began developing its own versions of basic electronic technology, most notably transistors--key to the solid-state electronics boom of the 1950s and 1960s. (The catchier name Sony was adopted in 1958 to internationalize and popularize the company’s brand.)

Sony created the first widely adopted transistor radio in 1955, a result of Morita’s knack for recognizing the commercial applications of products that had been invented elsewhere. Sony’s radio was initially produced by Western Electric; the American firm thought that the best possible use for the technology was in hearing aids--and granted Sony a license for it.

Sony followed that success with the first home tape recorder; its introduction of the first Trinitron color television sets in 1968 cemented the company’s position as a rising force in consumer electronics.

The Walkman personal stereo, introduced in 1979, rapidly became a nearly ubiquitous symbol of modern living. And as in so many other Sony successes, Morita played a key role in the device’s development, instructing his engineers to create a tape player that he could use when exercising.

In 1982, the company collaborated with Philips Electronics to produce the compact disc, which soon after became the dominant medium for music distribution.

The innovation of Sony’s offerings and the strength of its marketing produced one of the world’s most-recognized brands, with the power to squeeze out competitors with similar products.

“There is no consumer electronics company in the world that has established itself, its name, its brand the way Sony has,” said William Ouchi, a professor of management at UCLA and an expert in Japanese management techniques. The Sony name “adds as much value to an electronic product as Coca-Cola adds to sugar water.”

Experts credit Morita with the long-range planning and willingness to risk billions of dollars in marketing that was required to build that kind of brand recognition and loyalty. But his emphasis on simple designs was also a key factor.

“Among Japan’s electronics titans--Sony, Toshiba, Hitachi and Matsushita--only Sony has any real consumer recognition,” said Josh Bernoff, a market analyst with Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass. “It’s the only brand in consumer electronics that means more than ‘good enough to take home,’ but implies real innovation.”

However, the most important aspect of Sony’s success probably was Morita’s commitment to internationalism during the 1960s and early ‘70s--in contrast to more inward thinking that characterized Japanese companies at the time.

“Morita was in the vanguard of those who were saying, don’t be shortsighted, we are part of a larger world,” Ouchi said.

As evidence of that world view, Morita and his wife moved to New York for several years in the early 1960s--then unheard of for a Japanese business executive.

Sony’s success was not without some serious blunders, however. The company’s first product, a rice cooker, was an abject failure--it burned rice.

The Betamax videocassette recorder, introduced by Sony in 1975, was the first such device on the market and was widely viewed as superior to the competing VHS technology. At great expense, Sony attempted to make the product dominant in the VCR niche. But the market accepted VHS as the single standard, and Betamax soon become a symbol of technological irrelevance.

And the company’s repeated efforts to market a personal computer have never amounted to a serious challenge to the market leaders, despite some innovative designs with its most recent efforts.

Those failures were the product, however, of Morita’s willingness to place big bets on what he viewed as the keys to the future of electronic entertainment.

Among the biggest of those bets came in 1989, when Sony became the first Japanese company to invest in Hollywood, paying $3.4 billion to acquire Columbia Pictures and its sister studio, TriStar Pictures, with hopes of creating synergy between movies, television and music and its existing consumer electronics empire.

Under Morita’s successors, Norio Ohga and Nobuyuki Idei, Sony paid hundreds of millions to hire producers Peter Guber and Jon Peters to run Columbia and TriStar, only to see its investment squandered during a tenure marked by profligate spending. Their ill-fated regime resulted in a $3.2-billion loss in 1994 and spawned years of management turnover and instability at the studio.

Critics blamed the stunning loss on Sony’s naivete and apparent lack of a clear strategy for exploiting its unique combination of consumer electronics and Hollywood assets.

Morita was still at Sony’s helm when it acquired Columbia and TriStar, but it is unclear whether the major missteps were his own or those of his successors.

However, with the rise of the Internet, Sony’s strategy may prove prescient, and perhaps become Morita’s most lasting legacy.

“We’re finally in the era where entertainment is digital,” said Forrester’s Bernoff. Sony is finding ways to deliver its formidable media resources over the World Wide Web--a capacity considered essential to dominance in the future of the entertainment industry, he added.

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Times staff writers Claudia Eller and James Bates in Los Angeles and Valerie Reitman in Tokyo contributed to this report.