"Father of PlayStation" slams Sony's strategic failures

Sony Computer Entertainment boss Ken Kutaragi has lashed out at Sony's failure to compete in key sectors such as the MP3 player market in the past, in an unusually direct statement where he claimed that the firm is "growing up".

Speaking at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Tokyo, Kutaragi said that he has been frustrated for years with the company's reluctance to compete with products such as Apple's iPod music players, mainly due to resistance from the firm's music and movie divisions.

Until recently, Sony has insisted on sticking doggedly to proprietary formats such as the ATRAC music format, instead of using popular open formats such as MP3 which have been embraced by competitors.

According to Kutaragi, this approach - recently addressed by products such as PlayStation Portable, which supports open standards such as MP3 for music and MP4 for video - was driven by concerns over piracy from the media divisions.

In a rare admission of mistakes and an unusually direct criticism of the company's management, Kutaragi said that Sony's innovation had been "diluted", but promised that these problems had now been identified. "It's just starting," he told reporters at the club; "we're growing up."

Kutaragi is pushing the PlayStation Portable as a combined platform for games, music and movies, and the forthcoming PlayStation 3 home console is also expected to offer significant media functionality as well as a powerful videogames platform.

The Sony Computer Entertainment president, often referred to as the "Father of PlayStation", has presided over the creation of one of the most successful product lines in the company's history and is widely tipped to become the next president of Sony Corporation.

His decision to make such outspoken comments about other divisions within the company are likely to be interpreted as a broad hint that his promotion into the top job at the firm could come sooner, rather than later.