Stock Ticker: Sony

The same is true, albeit to a lesser extent, of many of Sony's other business areas. Music players, a field pioneered by Sony, have been devoured from two angles - by cheap commodity manufacturers at the low end, and by expensive smartphones at the high end. Cameras, on the other hand, have been replaced by smartphones at the low end (it's worth noting that the excellent camera in Apple's latest phone, the iPhone 4S, is actually manufactured by Sony), while the high end remains dominated by Nikon and Canon, a pair of companies with such immense inertia behind them in the SLR market that it would take catastrophic failure by both of them to push any significant market share in Sony's direction.

Mobile phones remain a potential growth market, as Sony indicated by its recent purchase of the Ericsson business, finally folding its Sony Ericsson joint venture into the company completely. PlayStation Suite will be a key part of any push in this corner of the business - but the company must be wary of the potential commoditisation of the Android phone market in particular, and will no doubt be mindful of the fact that the companies which dominate Android right now are South Korea's Samsung and Taiwan's HTC, firms from exactly the kind of territories which have ripped the heart out of the LCD TV market.

What Sony desperately needs to do is to step back from its business and be willing to prune away any sectors where it cannot differentiate itself from the box-shifting firms in continental Asia with whom it competes

What Sony desperately needs to do, then, is to step back from its business and be willing to prune away any sectors where it cannot differentiate itself from the box-shifting firms in continental Asia with whom it competes. Music and movies, of course, are good examples of this, but the really shining example is none other than the PlayStation business itself.

PlayStation is something that no rival can replicate (at least, no box-shifting rival can; one could argue that copying PlayStation is exactly what Microsoft has done), at once both a powerful brand and a family of products which are in no danger of being copied and commoditised by Chinese, South Korean or Taiwanese manufacturers. It's been argued for years, both within Sony and without, that the firm needed to focus its future strategy around PlayStation - never has the truth of this assertion been more clear.

Unsurprisingly, Sony has much to learn from Apple in this regard, since arguably Apple's greatest triumph (fantastic marketing and design aside) has been the creation of an ecosystem around its iDevices - linking together laptops, phones, music players and (to a certain extent) set-top boxes with the iTunes Store and latterly iCloud to create a seamless experience that keeps customers engaged with and loyal to the firm. The graph speaks for itself, in this regard.

Sony's attempts to create that sort of integrated service environment with PlayStation have, thus far, been patchy and scattered. They speak of a company still riven with internal conflicts, and worryingly, of a CEO who - in my own experience - is not terribly au fait with the PlayStation business, despite the likelihood of it being the lynchpin of any future success. Sony needs to do better, and with the markets being so resoundingly in agreement with that statement, it's clear that Sir Howard's days may be even more numbered than his planned 2013 retirement suggests.

The glimmer of hope, however, is that his mooted replacement is Kaz Hirai - a man who thoroughly understands PlayStation. Whether he has the bottle required to take on the vested interests within Sony which have continued to propel businesses like LCD TVs lurching forward, economic zombies feeding mindlessly on the profits of the firm's other divisions, is another question entirely.