Sony

Japanese  Sony Kk major Japanese manufacturer of consumer electronics products.

 

The company was incorporated by Ibuka Masaru and Morita Akio in 1946 as Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo (“Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation”). Ibuka, whose Japan Precision Instruments Company had supplied electronic devices during World War II, and Morita, an applied sciences instructor, had met during World War II as engineers designing heat-seeking missiles for the Imperial Japanese Army. Ibuka and Morita worked together for the next 40 years in what has been called one of “business history's most productive and intriguing relationships.” Ibuka's genius with product development and Morita's mastery of business management and marketing turned Sony into one of the most renowned brand names on the globe. Sony, which became the official name for the company in January 1958, was derived from the Latin sonus (“sound”) and was conceived to be an international and not a Japanese term.

 

The company's first consumer product was an electric rice cooker. Although this product sold poorly, Totsuko, as the firm's name was abbreviated, did have a successful business repairing radios and other electrical equipment. Its repair work for the Japanese radio broadcaster NHK had to be approved by the U.S. Army of Occupation, which later gave the young company repair jobs of its own.

 

In 1950 Totsuko introduced the first Japanese-designed tape recorder. Although this consumer item also sold poorly, the company's fortunes were about to take a dramatic turn. In 1952 Ibuka visited the United States and made the initial contacts for licensing the transistor from Bell Laboratories, then a division of Western Electric Company, the manufacturing arm of American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T). The next year Morita went to the United States and signed the deal with Western Electric.

 

This watershed agreement led to Totsuko's first hugely successful product line: transistor radios. Although Texas Instruments Incorporated was first to market with its Regency transistor radio in 1955, it was Sony's TR-63, an inexpensive shirt-pocket-sized all-transistor radio, that caught consumers' attention when it was released in 1957. Sony's pocket radios were a tremendous success and brought international recognition of the company's brand name.

 

By 1960 business in the United States prompted the creation of Sony Corporation of America, with headquarters in New York City. When the company opened its store in 1962 on Fifth Avenue, it unfurled the first Japanese flag to be flown in the United States since the beginning of World War II.

 

At the 1964 New York World's Fair, Sony introduced the MD-5, the first all-transistor desktop calculator. In 1968 the company shipped its first Trinitron colour television. By 1971, 40 percent of Japanese households had colour television sets, so Sony introduced the first colour video cassette recorder (VCR), which led to its introduction of the Betamax VCR in 1975. The Betamax, though widely considered the best VCR technology ever developed, was more expensive than its competitor, the VHS (Video Home System). As more and more studios and video stores turned to VHS, Betamax lost market share, and Sony finally introduced its own VHS in 1988.

 

In 1979 the Sony Walkman portable tape player hit the streets. Although Sony's engineers were skeptical about designing a device that could only play and not record, Morita insisted on developing the product, saying he would resign if the Walkman was not a success. The Walkman was an international sensation and eventually sold hundreds of millions of units. The first compact disc (CD) player emerged in 1982 from a development agreement between Sony and Dutch manufacturer Philips Electronics NV. Sony provided pulse-code modulation technology and combined it with Philips's laser system. The failure of Betamax had taught Sony a lesson; the format standard for CDs (and later digital videodiscs [DVDs]) was agreed upon by a wide range of companies in Japan, Europe, and North America. The next year Sony introduced the first camcorder.

 

By the late 1980s, Sony executives, especially the company president and the chairman of Sony Corporation of America, Norio Ohga, wanted to add entertainment content to Sony's operations. In 1988 it bought CBS Records Group from CBS Inc. (now CBS Corporation), thus acquiring the world's largest record company, and the next year it purchased Columbia Pictures Entertainment, Inc. The Columbia acquisition, the largest to that time of an American company by a Japanese firm, ignited a controversy in the United States. The controversy was fanned by Morita's contribution to The Japan That Can Say No, an essay written with Japanese nationalist Shintaro Ishihara in 1989. They claimed that Japan no longer depended on the United States and was a stronger, better nation than its postwar ally.

 

 

Photograph:AIBO entertainment robot, model ERS-111.

 

 

    * AIBO entertainment robot, model ERS-111.

 

The early 1990s were difficult years for Sony. The Japanese economy entered a decade-long recession, and both Ibuka and Morita suffered strokes (in 1992 and 1993, respectively). Morita officially retired in 1994 and died in 1999. With its founders no longer at the controls, Sony declared its first loss, more than $200 million, in 1993. Despite the business turmoil, Sony continued to design and deliver new products. In 1994 its entertainment division introduced its PlayStation video game console to the Japanese market. By 2002 the game unit was contributing more than 10 percent of the company's yearly revenues. Another major profit centre was Sony Online Entertainment, particularly its Internet virtual reality game EverQuest. The company's entertainment group also captured the imagination of many people with its robot dog, AIBO, introduced in 1999. In 1997 Sony introduced the VAIO line of personal computers. The VAIO was a high-quality and expensive system that the company marketed to users interested in developing or playing multimedia programs.

 

In 2005, following further disappointing annual financial reports, Howard Stringer was elevated from chairman and chief executive officer of the Sony Corporation of America to chairman and chief executive officer of the Sony Corporation. Although the appointment of a non-Japanese to head the parent company surprised many, some two-thirds of Sony's employees worldwide are non-Japanese.

Microsoft

leading developer of personal-computer software systems and applications. The company also publishes books and multimedia titles and offers electronic mail services. It has sales offices throughout the world but does virtually all of its research and development at its corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington, U.S.

 

In 1975 Bill Gates and Paul G. Allen, two boyhood friends from Seattle, converted BASIC, a popular mainframe programming language, for use on an early personal computer (PC), the Altair. Shortly afterward Gates and Allen founded Microsoft, deriving the name from the words “microcomputer” and “software.” During the next few years they refined BASIC and developed other programming languages. In 1980 International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) asked Microsoft to produce the essential software, or operating system, for its first personal computer, the IBM PC. Microsoft purchased an operating system from another company, modified it, and renamed it MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System). MS-DOS was released with the IBM PC in 1981. Thereafter, most manufacturers of personal computers licensed MS-DOS as their operating system, generating vast revenues for Microsoft; by the early 1990s it had sold more than 100 million copies of the program and defeated rival operating systems such as CP/M, which it displaced in the early 1980s, and later OS/2. Microsoft deepened its position in operating systems with its Windows graphical command program, whose third version, released in 1990, gained a wide following. By 1993, Windows 3.0 and its subsequent versions were selling at a rate of one million copies per month, and nearly 90 percent of the world's PCs ran on a Microsoft operating system. In 1995 the company released Windows 95, which for the first time fully integrated MS-DOS with Windows and effectively matched in ease of use Apple Computer's Macintosh OS. It also became the leader in productivity software such as word-processing and spreadsheet programs, outdistancing long-time rivals Lotus and WordPerfect in the process

 

Microsoft dramatically expanded its electronic publishing division, created in 1985 and already notable for the success of its multimedia encyclopedia, Encarta. It also entered the information services and entertainment industries with a wide range of products and services, most notably the Microsoft Network and MSNBC (a joint venture with the National Broadcasting Company, a major American television network).

 

As a result, by the mid-1990s Microsoft, which became a publicly owned corporation in 1986, had become one of the most powerful and profitable companies in American history. It consistently earned profits of 25 cents on every sales dollar, an astonishing record; net income topped $2.1 billion in the company's fiscal year ending June 30, 1996. However, its rapid growth in a fiercely competitive and fast-changing industry spawned resentment and jealousy among rivals, some of whom complained that the company's practices violated U.S. laws against unfair competition. Microsoft and its defenders countered that, far from stifling competition and technical innovation, its rise had encouraged both and that its software had consistently become less expensive and more useful. A U.S. Justice Department investigation concluded in 1994 with a settlement in which Microsoft changed some sales practices that the government contended enabled the company to unfairly discourage OS customers from trying alternative programs. The following year, the Justice Department successfully challenged Microsoft's proposed purchase of Intuit, the leading maker of financial software for the PC.

 

Partly because of its stunning success in PC software, Microsoft was slow to realize the commercial possibilities of network systems and the Internet. In 1993 it released Windows NT, a landmark program that tied disparate PCs together and offered improved reliability and network security. Sales were initially disappointing, but by 1996 Windows NT was hailed as the likely standard for PC networking, challenging Novell's NetWare. Microsoft did not move into Internet software until a new venture, Netscape Communications Corp., had introduced Navigator, a Web “browser” program that simplified the once-arcane process of navigating the World Wide Web. In a violent change of course, Microsoft quickly developed its own browser, Internet Explorer, made it free, and moved aggressively to persuade computer makers and Internet service providers to distribute it exclusively. By 1996 Microsoft was bundling Explorer with Windows OS and had begun the process of integrating Explorer directly into Windows. In response, Netscape accused Microsoft of violating its 1995 consent decree and sued; these efforts helped to persuade the U.S. Department of Justice to reopen a broad investigation of Microsoft.

 

In 1999, following a trial that lasted 30 months, a judge found Microsoft in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act and ordered the breakup of the company. In 2001 an appeals court overturned the breakup order but still found the company guilty of illegally trying to maintain a monopoly. The company's legal woes continued in 2004 with the European Union levying the largest fine, €497.2 million ($611 million), in the organization's history in retaliation for what were described as Microsoft's near-monopoly practices.

 

In 2001 Microsoft released the Xbox, a video game console that quickly captured second place in the video gaming market. In 2002 Microsoft launched Xbox Live, a broadband gaming network for their consoles. A more powerful gaming console, the Xbox 360, was released in 2005.

Intel

American manufacturer of semiconductor computer circuits. Besides microprocessors, the company makes microcontrollers (single-chip computers), memory chips, computer modules and boards, network and conferencing products, and parallel supercomputers. Its headquarters are in Santa Clara, California.

 

The company was founded in 1968 by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, who had invented the integrated circuit while working at Fairchild Semiconductor. They formed their own company, N M Electronics, in order to manufacture large-scale integrated (LSI) circuits. The two men were soon joined by Andrew Grove, and they changed the company's name to Intel (from “integrated electronics”).

 

The LSI circuits that Intel began making late in 1968 were semiconductor memories, which were then 10 times more expensive than magnetic core memories (the industry standard at the time). The company achieved its first breakthrough in 1970 with the 1103, a one-kilobyte dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) that was the first chip with the capacity to store a significant amount of information. In 1971 Intel introduced the 4004, a chip containing 2,300 transistors that was the world's first microprocessor. (A microprocessor is a chip that contains all the arithmetic, logic, and control circuitry necessary to perform as the central processing unit [CPU] of a computer.) With these products, Intel's semiconductor chips began to replace magnetic cores as the memories of computers.

 

Intel's 8080 (introduced 1974) was an eight-bit microprocessor—i.e., it processed information in groups of eight bits (binary digits) at a time. The world's first general-purpose microprocessor, the 8080 provided some of the first microcomputers used in cash registers, automatic teller machines, and a wide range of consumer products. IBM chose to use Intel's 8088 microprocessor (introduced 1978) in its first personal computer (PC), and because IBM's PC design was widely accepted, the 8088 and subsequent Intel microprocessors became a standard for all PC-type machines. In the following years Intel produced a series of faster, more powerful microprocessors. By the end of the 20th century Intel's top microprocessor, the Pentium 4, contained about 42 million transistors and a CPU that operated at up to 1.7 gigahertz. (Two arithmetic logic units each operated at double the CPU rate.) Although the company faced growing competition during the 1990s, its microprocessors were installed in more than 80 percent of new PCs.

Hitachi

highly diversified Japanese manufacturing corporation that comprises more than 1,000subsidiaries, including 335 overseas corporations. Headquarters are in Tokyo.

 

Hitachi's story begins in 1910 with its founder, Odaira Namihei, operating an electrical repair shop at a copper mine northeast of Tokyo. While repairing machinery for the mine, Odaira began to experiment with his own designs, and that same year he manufactured the first domestically produced 5-horsepower (3.7-kilowatt) electric motor. Odaira established his own company in 1912 and coined the company's name by superimposing two kanji (Chinese-derived Japanese) characters, hi meaning “sun” and tachi meaning “rise,” and enclosing them in a circle to form the now familiar Hitachi logo.

 

In its early years, Hitachi concentrated on the manufacture of heavy electrical equipment and industrial machinery. In addition to motors, generators, pumps, electrical cables, and transformers, Hitachi produced Japan's first large-scale direct-current locomotives (1924). In the 1930s Hitachi benefited from a strategic infusion of government funds, which allowed the company to diversify into metallurgy and communications equipment.

 

Following World War II, Hitachi was central to the reconstruction of Japan's industrial base, particularly in the generation of power. Hitachi manufactured mining equipment, built trains to transport coal to power plants, and built electrical-generation equipment. With the recovery of the Japanese economy in the late 1950s and early '60s, Hitachi began to shift its focus from industrial machinery to consumer goods, such as home appliances, air conditioners, and transistor radios.

 

In 1959 Hitachi established its first presence in the United States with Hitachi America, Ltd. After licensing technology from RCA Corporation, Hitachi developed and mass-produced all-transistor colour televisions beginning in 1969.

 

In 1959 Hitachi developed its first transistor-based computer. Throughout the next three decades, in a series of projects sponsored by Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry, Hitachi teamed with other Japanese companies to develop and manufacture semiconductor chips, microprocessors, computers, and supercomputers. In 1974 Hitachi manufactured the first in a series of general-purpose mainframe computers and in 1982 announced development of its first supercomputer. Hitachi gained notoriety in 1982 when its senior executives were caught in an FBI “sting” operation in Santa Clara, California, U.S., and arrested for attempting to buy IBM technology secrets. All the Hitachi executives pleaded guilty and were fined in 1983. Meanwhile, IBM settled its civil lawsuit against Hitachi out of court. In addition to winning substantial monetary damages, IBM won the right to inspect Hitachi's new products for five years for any design infringements.

 

In the late 1980s Hitachi continued to focus on the lucrative chip market, entering into an arrangement with Texas Instruments Incorporated to design and produce high-performance microprocessors and computer memory chips (16-megabit DRAM). It also purchased National Advanced Systems from National Semiconductor, renaming it Hitachi Data Systems, with the intent to sell Hitachi products, such as memory chips, disk drives, and other components, in the United States.

 

From its inception, Hitachi placed a strong emphasis on research and development. By 1993 Hitachi was operating 38 research laboratories and was one of the leading recipients of U.S. patents granted since 1963. Hitachi's presence became ubiquitous in everything from computer-aided control systems for high-speed trains and nuclear power plants to fibre-optic data-transmission equipment to personal facsimile machines and digital cameras.

 

A worldwide economic slowdown at the end of the 20th century particularly affected Japanese technology companies. Following multibillion-dollar losses by Hitachi and the Mitsubishi Electric Corporation in 2002, the companies announced that they would consolidate their nonmemory semiconductor businesses; the new company, Renesas Technology Corp., would surpass Motorola, Inc., as the largest manufacturer in the microcontroller market. Also in 2002, Hitachi reached an agreement with IBM on a new joint hard disk drive (HDD) company to operate in San Jose, California, in which Hitachi would eventually own a majority stake.