I think that maybe the problem was that engineers were encouraged to aim for the next completely wow gadget and become the father of the next Walkman, Playstation... And too little emphasis and reward for progressive minor improvement and polish removing rough edges (particularly in software). I think when software became more important and hardware less Sony didn't have the right balance of people and didn't do enough to adjust it.

I worked in TV Product Planning for a long time. There was virtually no contact with the content arms. It was remarkably hard to work with them even when we wanted to. If anything while I was there there was too little co-ordination and collaboration and too much of different parts of the company fighting or just going in opposite directions.