14 DAY TRIAL // reports that former chief executive officer and current chairman of the Sony Board of Directors, Sir Howard Stringer, is getting ready to leave the company for good.
Stringer started his tenure at Sony back in 1997, but he feels that leaving the company will allow him to “move forward with new opportunities” he's been presented with lately.
We aren't certain what kind of departure celebration Sony's leading staff will throw for him, if any, but we figure that there is a good reason he is moving on.
No exact time frame was given for his departure, although he did say something along the lines of the conclusion of his terms later this year.
Sony hasn't been doing very well on the IT industry this past decade. The R&D path it took didn't mesh well with the transformations that the video game and music industries underwent.
The tablet industry has also caused a shift in how consumers perceive gadgets and computers, and while this didn't affect the console market overmuch, it did influence every other layer of the IT market.
Stringer is one of the old crowd, which means that he is used to things going a certain way and products doing a certain thing.
Younger minds taking over could let the company become more open to ideas and inventive.
For those interested in Stringer himself, the man isn't Japanese. Instead, he is a British-born former CBS president who was knighted in 2000.
He joined Sony in 1997 and cut 10,000 jobs, slashed various product companies, closed factories and sold company assets in order to raise capital.
The Japanese public never really approved of a foreigner being named leader, not completely. Criticism was often leveled at him for not spending enough time in Tokyo (Stringer had to divide his time between Japan, the US and the UK).