Kutaragi Watch: PS3 failure = Promoted!
I generally loathe kotaku.com, but for once they actually had an interesting post. By now, everyone has heard about Kaz Hirai taking over Kutaragi’s position at Sony. Well, apparently Kutaragi is being maneuvered into an even higher position. Brian over at kotaku has noticed a trend which he dubs the “volcano school of management.”
Heat from bad decisions and poor management builds until a key person involved in the decision-making process is pushed up and up and up and finally ejected entirely from the company.
Hmm, sounds like Brian could be on to something, here. I’ve seen this kind of thing before. It’s sometimes easier to promote someone to higher and higher positions than to fire them, especially with high-level executive positions. Just ask Steve Ballmer.
Anyway, with the PSP just getting into its death throes and the PS3 launch being less than impressive, I can’t imagine why a failure like Kutaragi would get promoted, but Brian’s Volcano School of Management explains things pretty well, I think. It’s kind of like how bad game developers at Microsoft get “promoted” to manage things like Database Interoperability in Microsoft Excel.
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Sounds also like what Nintendo did to Gunpei Yokoi, creator of the GameBoy, Metroid, and Kid Icarus, after his Virtual Boy flopped. They stuffed him in some corner to do meaningless work until he quit.
So basically they did put ken in a closet and still pay him for doing nothing. Sounds like my kind of job.
I don’t much about corporation infrastructure, but why can’t they just fire him? Are they afraid he start working on the next Xbox or something?
@ Cruds.
It’s not that, but they would probably have to give him a massive severance payout if they fired him, it’s probably cheaper this way. Plus they might be afraid of getting some bad press out of it, it wouldn’t look too good for them if a whole heap of their executives got fired after that abysmal PS3 launch.
PSP death throes?
firstly the psp is not a failure,
true it doesnt sell as much as the ds but it still has a large installed user base,
and as for the promotion
the man has done good for them in the past and Japan does operate on a Honor system.
So Honorable Ken becomes a figure head.
Why do you loathe Kotaku? Crecente is the man.
I’m with you, George. Kotaku is a really crap blog. I’m really disappointed that it’s considered one of the top gaming blogs. I stopped reading it a while ago because I couldn’t take post after post dripping with infantile and sexist “humour.” Their jokes fall flat and their commenters are mostly jerks (http://www.lake-desire.com/newgameplus/index.php/archives/186). They used to be good, like in 2004, but as they added more bloggers and made more attempts at humour and sensationalism, it’s gone downhill.
Actually. Kutaragi was demoted years back for immense failures in his position at sony hardware. He was thrown over to a new computer entertainment department. To be precise, his new promotion is still below the position he held before his spectacular failures. He IS in fact being put in a position where he has less involvement and more just a vote. He basically is the yay or nay guy, not the running the company or coming up with ideas guy now.
Either way Sony Computer Entertainment is going to likely close its doors in 5 years. Analysts are already telling people to pull stocks slowly and that they don’t see Sony getting any return on PS3. After all, EA’s analysts said each game would have to sell 500,000 copies for Sony to break even on the consoles alone. That doesn’t even count the $4 billion in debt they are from just PS3 research and PSP and PS3 advertising. They also lost money on games they made like LocoRoco.
@Thunder Fist, That makes sense, didn’t thought about it that way.
I find it funny you said “loathe kotaku” on the day I cleaned out my RSS-feeds and decided I can perfectly live without them.
Only problem I’ve have with this blog is that I always need to fill in my name and email even if I tell the form to remember me.