Sony's Decline: When great tech isn't enough...

Sohrab Vossoughi wrote last year in the Harvard Business Review about the decline of Sony in the last two decades, and how the strategy that served it so well in the past just isn't enough now. Sony's products have always had great technology, capability, and quality - but now it's the design of the user experience that matters most.  According to Vossoughi: "In the early 80s, simply delivering technology in a usable form was still the biggest challenge, and Sony got it right before anyone else. ... In [today's] experience economy, these expectations are reversed. Technology is a given, and the question of 'what are the specs?' has been replaced by 'what is it like to use?'"  It's a refrain that I've heard professionally, too: clients claim that some tech has been tried before and didn't catch on, when what was really needed was a well-designed experience around that tech.  So Sony, don't fire those engineers - but hire some product designers to make a bigger difference!