Sir Howard Stringer, a Welsh-born former journalist, has been appointed top dog at Sony. As today's Guardian notes, it's a break with tradition:
Few had expected Sony to break with tradition and appoint a New York-based Brit to the top job. He will become the first non-Japanese speaker and the first without a background in engineering to head the company. Sir Howard, 62, is a self-confessed non-gadget guy.
It's certainly caused a lot of speculation in the technology industry, and in the business pages.
Sony has been a company plagued the ghosts of its own success - the Walkman in the 1980s, the PlayStation in the 1990s - which lent it a misplaced bravado in entering other markets and bred a complacency over the innovation which made it so successful.
Many commentators believe it must return to those trend-setting roots to rebuild itself. Indeed, today's Financial Times runs a leader on the Japanese firm under the sub-heading "The company needs to become an innovator again".
Reviving Sony is not an impossible mission. Sony achieved world-class success by developing brilliantly engineered "must-buy" products that created completely new markets. Its decline set in when it lost that single-minded focus. If the company is to rise again, it must avoid being sidetracked by ill-conceived diversification and rediscover its roots.
It's a big time coming up for Sony: the PlayStation Portable and the PlayStation 3 are on the horizon, and its ready to enter a battle for High Definition TV and the new Blu-Ray DVD format.
What's your advice to Howard Stringer?
