by Akio Morita
But as new-product quality and reliability and advancement become commonplace, we in industry are challenged to create things that will be new and intriguing enough to bring the customers to us. Obviously, we can never expect to survive in business if we do not keep improving what we offer to the public, and that takes new technology.
The reproduced music people now can hear in their homes is the most accurate in history, thanks to the laser technology of the new compact disc players. The compact disc technology, in which a tiny laser reads information embedded on a plastic-coated aluminum record (there is no need of a stylus riding in grooves as on old-fashioned records), was the opening of a new era in which people can hear music exactly as it was played by the musicians. Only the music is heard, without annoying sounds like tape hiss and record surface noise from scratches or debris in the grooves and with the dynamic range that went into the music as it was played. Conductor Herbert von Karajan felt so strongly about this new development that even before we had marketed our full range of players and before there were many compact discs in the shops, he and I made an appearance together to talk with international journalists in Salzburg and later in Tokyo about this new development and its importance.
Some of my colleagues in electronics say that the laser is one of the greatest inventions of the century, as important as the transistor, the integrated circuit, and latter-day large-scale integrations. I agree. There is no doubt that laser technology has changed and will continue to change our lives for many decades. The first impressive uses of laser technology that the public was aware of were in industry and in medicine—the use of lasers in surgery was a quantum leap over the days when only the scalpel was available to aid the cool judgment of a master surgeon. It took men of vision to bring the laser from the laboratory and hospital to the living room. Now we are using it in digital, optical, and audio equipment, where it delivers optimum sound and picture fidelity, but this is only the beginning of what can become a revolution in the home, in which the laser will be the key to a long list of new devices, from burglar alarms to information and command systems.
The use of the laser to read a digital disk has been advanced to storage systems, where a single small 4.7-inch diameter disk can be programmed to hold about two hundred and seventy-five thousand pages of text. The entire Grolier Encyclopedia is available today on a small disk, and by punching buttons on your keyboard you can have instantaneous access to any page you want. It is now possible to put all sorts of information on such a disk and store it for retrieval later. This opens up great possibilities for researchers, for libraries, for publications. Applications for companies are limitless, for inventories and for storing enormous amounts of data of all kinds that can be retrieved almost instantly. This kind of device linked to, or as part of, a computer linked by telephone to a data base anywhere in the world will be a combination of remarkable power. We have barely scratched the surface in the applications of laser technology, computers, and communications.
My son Masao is in charge of home and personal computers for Sony, and he is impatient with us sometimes because he thinks top management isn’t putting enough effort into his division. “I am under pressure every day to come up with new ideas for the use of the computer in the home,” he says, “but it is a hard business. People visualize a stand-alone computer with a disk drive and a keyboard like a typewriter. It may be difficult to convince people they need a computer, but an information-gathering and -processing machine is different and that is our target. Everybody has a television and a telephone, and if you add a computer immediately you have the makings of an information system. You just need to add the software. There is no question that the whole world is going in that direction.”
I am sometimes amazed that as technologically progressive as we think we are in top management, young people coming up through the lower ranks today often scold us for being slow to pick up on the new technologies. I guess we did the same thing in our day. “A couple of decades ago,” Masao says, “the senior people in this company passed down their know-how to the younger ones. The older managers knew the analog technology inside and out and they were idolized, and rightly so. But today some of our newly graduated people know more about digital technology, more than their seniors, so they pass their know-how up; it is a completely new development.”
One of our strengths at Sony is that we do not structure our company so rigidly that the NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome applies. The expression refers to the reluctance of some arrogant managers to accept any idea for which they cannot take credit. This is sometimes a problem in traditional Japanese companies with rigid structures. Although some of our best ideas have come from the graying heads at the top, we have always found vitality in the lower echelons and have encouraged and rewarded it, and so it will be, with perhaps more emphasis, in coming years. Many of the technological breakthroughs we have made, from the transistor to the Trinitron tube and on to our high-density television systems, have been made by persistent young people who were given their heads to follow a hunch.
We are headed in the direction of new communications systems in the nineties and beyond. Satellite dish antennas are already popular in the United States for home use, and this will change broadcasting, because with even a small parabolic antenna, the amount of information that can be brought into the home from many different sources is enormous. This will require more versatile VCR or laser disk systems able to store the information for later use. It will have an impact not only on broadcasting and broadcasters, but also on their advertisers.
Some of the cable companies in the United States began scrambling their signals so that people with satellite dishes who do not have an authorized unscrambler cannot receive their picture. But basic electronics technology is so open that there are few secrets, and clever technicians have figured out how to build unauthorized unscramblers.
We have seen the example in the early days of computers of how smart young people could break into some of the most carefully protected computers, and so I believe information security will become an even bigger problem as we move into the next century, especially as even the new smaller computers will be able to operate at blinding speed, making millions of computations in seconds.
In the here and now, the standard black plastic longplaying record is giving way to the CD. It is a change just like the move away from the old 78-rpm standard-play record to the LP. Small home television cameras in the eight-millimeter tape format will soon become the standard camera for the amateur, just as the larger format Betamovie and VHS cameras shoved eight-millimeter film cameras into the back of the family closet. Now a high-powered video camera small enough to fit in one corner of an attache case, and all self-contained, with a cassette smaller than a standard audio cassette, will make fine, sharply focused pictures even in low-light levels. This is an evolution very much like the change from the clumsy old folding-bellows still cameras and awkward sheet-film holders to the compact thirty-five-millimeter cameras so widespread today. Those thirty-five-millimeter cameras will be replaced by cameras like our Mavica filmless camera, which uses a charged coupled device to digitize the picture on a small spinning disk, with no chemical processing to worry about. Mavica and similar filmless cameras are not on the market for the general public yet, but as a professional tool, as in the case of the transpacific Olympics pictures for Asahi Shimbun, they are proving very versatile.
In video we now have high-definition TV with 1,125 scanning lines (vs. 525 lines in the United States and 626 in Europe), which gives the TV picture the sharpness and quality of a good still photograph. I think we will not only provide finer pictures in people’s homes, with less strain on the eyes, but also revolutionize the motion picture business with this new kind of TV. With conventional TV the brightness is too low for movies, but with our new advances, TV cameras and videotape may one day replace the big old thirty-five-millimeter film movie cameras just as electronic news gathering with small videotape cameras replaced
the sixteen-millimeter film cameras once carried by TV news teams and U-Matic video tape recorders replaced the broadcasting studio sixteen-millimeter projectors.
Director Paul Shrader shot a portion of his film Mishima in videotape as an experiment and was very pleased with it. The videotape gives instant playback on a scene, unlike conventional film, which needs to be processed chemically. Some directors are using video cameras while they shoot a scene in film to get a quick look at it to determine whether they have to shoot the scene again, and this is resulting in savings already. Francis Ford Coppola estimated that he could cut production costs as much as 30 percent with videotape, and a lot of that is time saved. Videotape images can’t yet be projected on to the big theater screens; they must be transferred to film. But the possibilities for video movies have excited technicians in Japan and abroad. Special effects, dubbing, erasing, splitting screens, and other popular techniques being used in film today are much easier to do electronically on tape. Using electronic, digitalized techniques, you can make Superman fly without wires. I believe that Sony technology will be widespread in filmmaking before the turn of the century.
People who saw ABC’s super-slow-motion video during the 1984 Olympics were seeing the results of a Sony Super Motion video system based on high-definition TV technology. It makes slow motion possible at one-third the speed of conventional slow motion and with less blurring.
In other technological areas of video, Sony was awarded an Emmy in 1984, which I was happy to accept on Sony’s behalf, for a new video recorder with mass image storage capability specially suited for computer graphics. It was our fourth Emmy. (The first was for Trinitron in 1973; the second for U-matic in 1976; and the third for one-inch helical-scan videotape recording in 1979.) In 1985 Billboard magazine gave us its Trendsetter Award for our revolutionary small D-5 compact disc player. We demonstrated our JumboTRON with its giant 82-by-131-foot TV screen at Science Expo ’85 in Tsukuba, Japan, and have begun installing models with somewhat smaller screens in the U.S. We’re still making radios, too, including the world’s thinnest AM-FM unit, which is only four millimeters thick and weighs only thirty-three grams, just a bit more than an ounce. We are selling technology on our own new MCZ method of producing high-quality silicon crystals for very large-scale integrations to companies in the United States (Monsanto Electronic Materials Company), Japan, and Italy. We and RCA Astro-Electronics have arranged for Sony to market advanced communications satellites in Japan, and we are on the market in North America with units that combine computer, TV, and communications technology.
In fact, as I look ahead toward the next century, it strikes me that we are working on some of the very techniques that have the most promise of ensuring mankind’s survival. In my company, we have no specific technology in aerospace, although other Japanese companies are becoming more and more involved in this; some parts of Boeing wide-bodied jet planes are made in Japan, and design and engineering on new kinds of engines are proceeding rapidly here in cooperation with British and other European companies. Japan’s new H-series of three-stage rocket boosters will be available for putting two-ton satellites in geostationary orbit in the 1990s. But those areas that are expected to receive the greatest emphasis—optoelectronics, digital technology, video technology, and laser technology—happen to be our specialties. Just where this will take Sony is a matter for the imagination. I don’t think there are any other companies that are as specialized in all those areas. However, I often remind my colleagues that other companies have also been looking into these fields, so the leadership will go to the company that manages its technology best. It is not safe to assume that just because we have all this technology everything will be OK. But since we very clearly have this advantage, we have to see how we can best make it bear fruit. We have poured billions into our technical laboratories for R&D, and others have watched us and taken advantage of our up-front investment by moving into our field after we have pioneered it, but we cannot change this. I have no intention of complaining to anybody. We have boasted about our capability in these crucial areas, and now the responsibility is on management in the next fifteen years to see what we can do. We would have to be asleep if we did not produce any fruit from such a lush orchard.
III
We had a meeting of department chiefs one Saturday in Tokyo, and somebody asked me whatever happened to our slogan “Research Makes the Difference.”
He hadn’t seen it in our ads lately. We got to talking, and I said that if we just kept saying “research makes the difference,” our people might start to think that research is enough to keep the company prosperous. It is not. I used the example of the French. France is a country that believes “research makes a difference,” and thus they have many unique things. The design of the Caravelle jet passenger plane with the engines in the rear was a novel idea that was copied and capitalized on by many aircraft makers, but the French didn’t profit from it. They failed to improve and develop their original design and they lost control of it. Citroen produces a unique car with hydraulic suspension, a very versatile concept, and with a unique style. But they have had problems and could not market this car in very large numbers. France makes advanced weapons systems like the Exocet, which sank a British warship during the Falklands war, atomic weapons, ships, supersonic fighters, and a powerful rocket booster, Ariane, to put satellites in orbit. (We Japanese do not make weapons except in small quantities for our own defense and we are prohibited from exporting anything with “war potential” under our constitution, so we are out of this competition.) The French also have a high-speed train, the TGV, which is faster than our bullet trains, but it is to Japan that other countries have come to ask for high-speed rail technology.
The British invented the modern jet aircraft engine (Germany had a jet engine toward the end of the war, but was defeated before they could develop it beyond use in one fighter plane, the Messerschmitt 262, which was produced only in very small numbers). The British built the first jet airliner, the Comet. But the Comet had an unhappy history, and England lost its lead in engines and airframes to the Americans.
My point is that it is unwise merely to do something different and then rest on your laurels. You have to do something to make a business out of a new development, and that requires that you keep updating the product and staying ahead of the market. Our research director once mentioned the importance of cross talk between R&D and the business side, sales and marketing, which is what we have always tried to stimulate. I believe the reason Japan’s industry has advanced as far as it has is that the companies thought they were behind and so, in effect, they went to school, learning up-to-date techniques, paying “tuition” for imported technology. But what you learn in school only becomes useful when you add something to it that is yours, and you do it yourself.
The challenge for all companies, not just ours, is in management of the new technologies, new developments, and new products. We will need a lot of new ideas. We will have to put all of our technologies together to create the complete systems we will need in the future. This means quite a change. When we started our company, we had one division making transistors, another making tape recorders, and another making radios. It can’t be that way in the future. We will have to try to put all of the great engineering power of our company together and use that as one system. We are beginning to do it now. The kind of approach most companies, including ours, used up to now was considered fine as long as the people were happy and as long as each division maintained its place in the total company balance. But in the future, more flexibility will be needed, and the engineering power from one section of the company may be involved in work everywhere. Knowing how to make the best use of your engineers will be the test of whether a company will succeed in the coming age. Some of our competitors will have problems from now on. They will realize that they have to make a system of their separate divisions, but will have to figure out how to do it. Technological management will be the key to success for companies
anywhere in the world in the coming years.
We are quite advanced in it already. At Sony we have a monthly R&D report meeting attended by all top executives and heads of divisions. At each meeting, we have five or six reports bringing us up to date on the status of research in important areas. A team assigned a project must report to us their theme, their budget, the expenditure so far, the time schedule they planned, the real-time development, and how early or late they expect to finish with their project. If they are just about finished, they will sometimes bring the machine or device to show us. If they report on, say, a new type of digital recorder, for example, something really top secret, we listen to the report, then dismiss the team, and we executives have a discussion about whether this research is feasible for business in the future or not. We have seen some reports of amazing developments and yet have decided they were not feasible for us as a business and have suspended work on them. And we have spent large sums before dropping some projects, but that is much better than allowing an unfeasible project to go on and eat up even more money. The reason we put so much emphasis on this is that R&D expenditures decrease our profits, and if it is not feasible as a business proposition there is no justification to continue. Knowing when to stop or continue is the key to success.
Now that we have so many divisions, I saw some years ago that we were doing a lot of parallel development work, and also some work was being done almost secretly in one division that could benefit another division. So we now hold a technology symposium each month, where division heads and researchers can discuss what they are doing. But most crucially, I think, we also reorganized our top structure to add an R&D planning and coordination division, which would report to the executive, in addition to the usual accounting and corporate planning staffs.