But–and maybe I’m inagining things–doesn’t Sony have a media division?
Yeah Sony has a HUGE media division. They made the Ruruni Kenshin OVAs, among other things. Plus they have several major music labels both english and japanese, plus their games, movies, ect.
quote:
Originally posted by Nandemonai:
It makes sense, though, that they'd spin off their animation division. It was always kind of odd, that a hardware manufacturer would be in the animation business. A bit too diverse to really keep everything in sync, I'd imagine...
If you really think about it though it makes perfect sense. Especially when you figured Pioneer was a leading manufacturer of LD players. You would want to make sure you get a steady stream of new media so people would keep buying your players.
That’s why I can’t figure out why Pioneer got rid of their anime division–you’d think it was making money, and you’d think that they’d want to keep it as part of a media project, like Sony has.
Organizational friction and chaos. If one is doing much better than the other then the weak part will drag on the rest and it’s better off being split. Even if both of them are doing well, the hardware business is complex, and the anime business is also complex; doing one well is hard and doing both well can be even harder. It comes down to “you can only concentrate on so many things at once” and companies engages in 2 different business sectors like this … tend to splinter them off occasionally when they can’t deal with it anymore.
Of course I have a grand total of 2 years’ real world experience and know nothing about these companies in particular so I’m just blowing smoke out of my ass, but it seems right to me.
Well, you’ve got more experience than me, technically speaking. Although it does show a disturbing trend in Japanese business toward Western thought and away from kaizen, which is what made the Japanese market so strong in the first place.
This is what happens when I’m out for a week, I’m totally confused…
Hmm, I thought it was the whole entertainment division, not just the anime part was sold to Dentsu. So music, DVD’s, all those fun stuff. Or am I getting things mixed up even further?
I believe it was the entire entertainment division, but I just narrowed it down to anime since that’s what we were mainly talking about.
Interesting but just read j-lists newletter and it had some stuff related to what we are talking about. Guess in japan companies use their parents names in different business unlike in the US where they create a separate name to differentiate it form it’s parent company. It’s funny to learn that a major construction company in japan is also a television network, and Sony is also a bank.