by engineers in China,” he wrote in an email.
The final design, however, achieved what the chairman had been
pushing for: a minimalist work devoid of feature bloat. In April 2006, the
Bordeaux TV was released to the public at a price of $1,300, for what was a
relatively small twenty-six-inch set. Yunje Kang, the designer, worried that
the market wasn’t ready. But the innovative TV flew off the shelves,
eventually selling more than three million units.
“The selling point is very clear—it’s slim and sleek,” Shin Sang-heung,
senior vice president of Samsung Electronics Visual Display Division, told
reporters at a press conference. The new television was so successful that in
2006 Samsung eclipsed Sony as the number one manufacturer of LCD
TVs.
As Samsung products rose in prominence, so too did the career of Jay
Lee, even though he played no obvious role in product development. He
was now the chief customer officer (CCO) of Samsung Electronics, a
position created especially for him, giving him greater responsibilities and
allowing him to travel the world meeting executives from Samsung’s supply
chain to ink supplier deals.
In 2005 Sony’s CEO, Idei, stepped down. In response, the Japanese,
mired in a recession, did the unthinkable. They hired a Westerner to run the
company out of their headquarters in Tokyo: Howard Stringer, a Brit–
turned–American citizen and former CBS executive.
Stringer met internal resistance and a language barrier, and over the
years of his tenure, he struggled to help Sony regain its footing. The
company experienced losses nearly every year from 2009 to 2015. In 2011
Sony exited the Samsung-led displays joint venture, and Stringer, unable to
repair the broken company, would step down in 2012. Once the world’s
admired product, Sony Walkmans had disappeared from the marketplace
with the rise of the iPhone. The Sony Ericsson phones had failed to catch
on. Sony Trinitron televisions had been passed by in the marketplace. Once
the world’s most innovative consumer company, Sony, the Japanese
miracle, had been reduced to a whimper.
“Running a big company is like running a cemetery: there are thousands
of people beneath you, but no one is listening,” Stringer later remarked. “It
was a bit like that at Sony.”