Last year, Sony introduced an uninspiring piece of hardware to the world: The Sony Tablet. Understandably, consumers were not impressed. The hardware was expensive, it was late to the show, and its vanilla offerings were undifferentiated from the competition. Consumers were not impressed, and they showed it with their wallets. But it didn’t have to be this way. Sony, perhaps more than any other company in the world, was equipped to take on Apple in this space had they striven for greatness.

Sony was uniquely positioned to face the new era of consumer electronics: the fusion of media and devices. While we rightfully see Sony as a hardware company first and foremost, it is also a company whose profits are now primarily derived from their media units: games, movies, music, and the like. Sony Pictures, Sony Music, and Sony Computer Entertainment are the reasons why the company as a whole is able to survive. The only other company with the combination of hardware and media needed to stand up to Apple was of course Amazon, who had engaged in the media arms race head-on and acquired Lab 126 in order to create its hardware.

Take a step back and consider this: a tablet that is able to purchase and play Playstation games, Sony Pictures’ movies, and Sony Music’s songs. In addition, had it worked with the Japanese publishing houses that were fearing the threat of Amazon’s kindle for their lives, the hypothetical Sony Tablet could have been the first legitimate ebook platform for Japan, a country mired in an unending love affair with books [1]. It could have set up global translation and digital distribution of Japan’s notoriously slow-moving media that are pirated all over the world: manga, anime, and the like. It would have been a product unlike any other; one that would stand had above shoulders amongst its peers, looking up only at Apple.

Though I claim that had Sony acted with great gusto, they could have stood up to the threat from the West, it would have taken a strategic decision of mammoth proportions. It would cannibalize multiple business units and would have required inter-industry negotiations of almost unprecedented levels. Heads of these divisions would have certainly fought to the death to prevent the erosion of their businesses, to the detriment of perhaps the company as a whole [2]. Japanese publishers, famous for their tortoise-like speed, are shackled by players up and down the supply chain who would balk at such radical changes [3]. Who knows? maybe this conversation did happen inside Sony, only to be quashed by the never-ending squabbling and resistance from its media chiefs. Amazon themselves made the decision to cannibalize their cushy physical goods sales model in order to better prepare for the future.

But in this age of hyper-competition, if you don’t iterate upon your own market, then someone else will. Recall that even Apple cannibalized its own original iPod with a succession of new models, then drove its own market sector into extinction with the iPhone. Sony is the company that famously could not seize upon the opportunity of the MP3 player, afraid that it would hurt its MD and CD Player businesses. To destroy your own core business in favor of the future is to think long term.

Long term is a theme we’re all familiar with, particularly in the wake of the Financial Crisis of 2008-2010. But how many companies are actually able to think long term? It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that in order to stand up to the pressure of institutional share holders, a company needs its founder(s) to be leading the company.

When we think of companies that are making sacrifices today to plan for ten, twenty years down the road, which names come to mind? For me, the names coincide with the most prominent names in tech today: Google (Page and Brin), Apple (Jobs), and Amazon (Bezos) [4]. They are companies that are lead, if not in body then by a domineering and ever-present spirit, of its founder(s) [5].

As they say, once a___, always a ___. Once a hardware company, perhaps Sony is destined to stay a hardware company, without the guiding light of its legendary founder.

In the distant past, Sony was a company that was held in awe by the world for its outlandish risk taking. Its successes and failures are legendary. But as with so many innovative companies, the loss of its founders was also the loss of its inspiration.

Will Sony ever rise from the ashes, born again like the rising sun? Unlikely.

[1] The price of inaction for these publishers, knowing for years that the earth-shattering moment of ebooks would eventually arrive in their isolated land, is Amazon’s take no prisoners pricing scheme that will suck their bones try. They could have negotiated a much sweeter deal with Sony, if they could have decided to sacrifice a leg in order to save their bodies. Alas, it did not happen.

[2] Sales figures at SCE, Sony Music, and Sony Pictures would have certainly fallen had they combined forces to create such a media tablet solution. But if they resist change that consumers demand, then someone else will surely offer what the customers desire.

[3] Only in 2012 has Kindle finally made inroads in said country.

[4] Facebook is so new that they haven’t had to make such critical choices yet (though the exception might be mobile), and Microsoft has so far been slow to adapt.

[5] Investors have criticized Amazon for its razor thin margins and its heavy spending on products such as the Kindle Fire, which for now, are creating losses for the company. Investors similarly fired at Apple for not rewarding shareholders (i.e. themselves) by using its cash horde for share buybacks or dividends — a practice that was resisted until this year, until after Jobs’ death. Google was criticized for its large investment in research with seemingly no practical business application, and eventually shut down its Google Labs operations. While the results are not in, perhaps we are seeing the first signs of Apple and Google looking at now rather than the future.

Which is more important: Quality or Quantity? In the realm of blogging, I believe that neither quality nor quantity are completely dominant factors. In order to satisfy the reader, a healthy balance is needed. An extreme weighting towards quality or quantity, while sacrificing the other in equivalent fashion, would seem to dissatisfy the audience. Suppose that this is the case; what kind of numbers is the reader looking for?

In retrospect, one blog a day is probably a bit too much. Even five blogs a week proved to be on the high side, as frequency was maintained at the price of quality. My writing style became noticeably more convoluted, my sentences more verbose. Long time habits took over, and conscious editing efforts for the audience took a back seat. The stated purpose was quantity, and it came with a price.

If there can be too many articles, then at what point does it similarly become too little? If we can write too many articles that quality suffers and the reader becomes uninterested, then at what point does the reader lose interest because of the scarcity of articles [1]?

What if we wrote just one article a year? Unless we’re already celebrities in our own right, we’re not likely to maintain readership.

What if we wrote once a month? We’re getting closer, and it’s certainly not impossible, but we’d likely be demanded of mind-blowing quality, whether it be entertainment, creativity, or insight, to interest potential readers [2].

What if we wrote once a week? For most of us, this is “in the ballpark” of where we want and need to be. Great writing isn’t mandatory; even just good writing is more than acceptable, provided that our style and content matches what our readers are looking for. My current theory is that for most of us who are not super famous or super talented already, somewhere between one to three articles a week gives us the mind share of our audience [3] and the attentiveness we need to create useful prose and improve upon it.

So for me, it’s time to reevaluate. Now that I have proven to myself that I can attain frequency, it seems appropriate for to sacrifice some of it in order to strive for less superficial compositions [4]. Like so many of our pursuits, balance is a key ingredient to our progress.

[1] This primarily concerns the independent blog; if there are multiple contributors or if the reader subscribes to an aggregated list of bloggers, then the supply problem is almost completely mitigated. Quality reigns supreme.

[2] RSS readers surely help us out in this regard though. In the days of bookmarks, we’d likely be given a cold shoulder here.

[3] Readership may seem superficial and vain in all of this, but it is critical in keeping our motivation.

[4] Only giving myself 30 - 60 minutes in the morning to create an article proved to be creatively limiting.

Are you above average?

If you’re like most, then you probably thought something along the lines of, *”well, I’m not spectacular per se, but I can hold my own. I’d say I’m slightly above average.” For some of us, it may very well be the case that we are above average; but it’s quite likely that we’re overestimating ourselves [1].

One prominent example is in online dating. Studies have shown that over 70% of us rate ourselves above average in looks in such settings [2]. A separate study using the site “Hot or Not”, determined that our own self-assessment was significantly higher than what our peers would rate us [3].

So psychological studies consistently show our propensity to overvalue ourselves. But honestly, a study done by an anonymous researcher in some ivory tower may not be convincing to many of us; we surely have the right to remain skeptical. But let’s look at our everyday, normal lives for a bit. Haven’t we sesn first hand, this kind of self-overvaling behavior?

Let’s move the setting to the office, the site of our daily toils. Now, think about some of our coworkers, both current and former. Let’s think about the passing comments they made about how unappreciated they are, their gripes about being passed by for a promotion in favor of another coworker, or their self-promotions about how hard and how long they worked. What did we feel when we heard these comments? Did we agree? Did we smirk? Did we empathize? For some, the unhappiness was probably justified; there are plenty of brilliant people who go unnoticed or unappreciated. But looking back at our experiences, was everyone assess themselves accurately? How many people made us think, *”I can understand where he’s coming from, but I honestly can’t agree.” ?

What is the barometer to judge these people’s self-assessment? The equivalent of the “Hot or Not” test, cited earlier, is the simple converstaions we have with other coworkers each day. Taken in aggregate, our peers have a much more balanced perspective for our true abilities and results. In such an office poll, we quickly find out that there are indeed discrepancies between self-assessed values and the common opinion. The guy who was passed over for a promotion lost out to someone who delivered more results than he; the guy who asserts that he works extremely hard actually works significantly fewer hours than the engineers across the office who put in 12+ hour days every day, plus weekends.

Most people are firmly entrenched in the idea that they are above average. What is the root of this behavior? Is it the incomplete dataset we operate off of [4]? Is it a self-defense mechanism?

Whatever the root cause may be, self-awareness of the matter is essential; not only to avoid being labeled by our peers as a self-overvalueer (which sooner or later devolves into mockery), but to be able to see ourselves clearly — to take steps in becoming truly above average [5].

[1] Of course, the area in which we consider ourselves to be above average will differ from person to person when the question is posed so vaguely, so it may very well be that we’ve all subconsciously chosen a biased area from which to base our above-averageness on.

[2] I believe one of the authors of the study was Ariely. The number of users who rated themselves below average in looks was eitehr 2% or 12%, a paltry sum.

[3] So if we rated oureslves a 7/10 on an online dating site, then we’re probably closer to a 5 or 6 when judged by our peers/mates. Of course, it’s possible that those judging us have an upwardly skewed perspective as well, distorting the results.

[4] After all, we have the most data about ourselves.

[5] If so desired.